Spartans, prepare for glory!

Spartan tests are ordinary Ruby code samples.

puts "Hello, world"             # => nil
1 + 1                           # => 2

If you want, you can just run them as a plain ruby file.

ruby examples/01_basics.rb

Running like this won't actually test anything, however, except that the code runs.

Spartan files are annotated in xmp format. xmp annotations are special comments that follow lines of code. They consist of a pound symbol followed by a space and a hashrocket:

"natraps".reverse               # => "spartan"

If you install the 'rcodetools' gem and run the "xmpfilter" program on the file, you'll see the special annotations are filled in with the result of the annotated line.

In addition, xmpfilter also inserts any program output on STDOUT or STDERR at the end of the processed file.

warn "This is STDERR"
puts "This is STDOUT"

(Look at the bottom of this section to see the output filled in.)

Any text you put after the special xmp comments will be replaced by the actual values and output that the program generates.

So if you write a line like this:

2 + 2 # => 5

xmpfilter will replace the "5" with a "4".

2 + 2 # => 5

It's this last property of xmpfilter which makes Spartan possible. When writing Spartan tests, you write xmp-annotated Ruby code. But instead of just adding xmp comments, you also fill in the values you think will be generated by xmpfilter. Then you run spartan.

Spartan runs the file through xmp filtering, filling in the actual outputs and values. Then it compares that output to the original file. If there are no differences, your predictions were correct, and the test passes. If the input and output differ, the test has failed. The failure report is simply the textual diff between your expected outputs and reality.

Hey, remember when I said the output would be inserted at the end of the file? Well, here it is:

>> Hello, world

This is STDOUT