Function-Captures for ExUnit's Case.describe/2

[Florian Neumann]

The example for ExUnit's "Case.describe/2" uses a String to reference to the given Function in test:

describe "String.capitalize/1" do...
 
Changes to the actual implementation (names, arity) are currently not picked up by the compiler or test frameworks.

To help myself out i wrote a helper function "literally/1" which accepts a function as parameter and turns it into a fully qualified function capture string:

describe literally(&String.capitalize/1) do...

This removes potential code smells when referring to functions.

Having a dedicated function for this adds a lot of clutter (every describe line get's expanded and you have to maintain that helper function in each project).

So if this is something improving the developer experience for anybody else i'd like to propose the additional acceptance of function-captures as first parameter of describe/2:

describe &String.capitalize/1 do...

P.s.: i hope i got the terms function capture for function references right.

[Austin Ziegler]

I like this idea. In your implementation, wouldn’t `inspect/1` do the same as your `literally/1`, more or less?

```elixir

iex(3)> inspect(&String.capitalize/1)
"&String.capitalize/1"

```

-a

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elixir-lang-co...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/3b47d4bf-4e91-4896-8549-a9ffab5890a0n%40googlegroups.com.

--

Austin Ziegler • halos...@gmail.com • aus...@halostatue.ca
http://www.halostatue.ca/ • http://twitter.com/halostatue

[Florian Neumann]

Good find, yes indeed (at least as far as i can see)! Now i can at least get rid of manually importing the helper everywhere.. :)

[Florian Neumann]

Okay - there is a difference in the functionality:

inspect/1 does *not* check if the function exists.

the

literally/1 function also checks if the function was "exported".