Caution: my English is far from perfect. (Русский тоже не всегда хорош).

Thursday 6 March 2008

Junit 4.4 new assertion mechanism is a very clear demonstration of java limitation comparing to lisp.

It is obvious that ASSERT A > 2 OR B < 3 when failed should print a message "assertion failed: a > 2 or b < 3. This is trivial to implement with lisp macros, but when the language does not provide programmatic access to the program source code, our ASSERT receives only result of expression calculation - a boolean.

Therefore people must create new expression specification language and duplicate expression evaluation that is already present in java compiler.

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