I finally fixed a longstanding duplicate definitions issue with Femtounit, my Interlisp unit test framework.

Femtounit creates a new File Manager type for unit tests, TESTS. DEFTEST, which defines a test, adds an entry of type TESTS and expands into an internal function that carries out the test when called. The problem was the File Manager noticed and tracked two objects for each DEFTEST, the TESTS entry and the function. But the function is an implementation detail that shouldn't be tracked by the File Manager or seen directly by the user.

To fix the issue, in the DEFDEFINER that creates the new type I added a call to UNMARKASCHANGED immediately after the definition of the internal function. UNMARKASCHANGED undoes the association with the File Manager the creation of the internal function establishes. I had tried DELDEF but it removes both the association and the internal function.

I also refactored the definition of the internal function to use DEFINEQ instead of assigning a LAMBDA to the function cell of the symbol naming the test, which is less clear and obscures the intent.

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I integrated Femtounit with the File Manager by defining the new type TESTS for Femtounit tests and redefining DEFTEST in terms of it.

It turns out it's not a good idea as the tests get duplicated. The DEFTEST macro expands into a DEFINEQ function definition and the File Manager notices both, the DEFTEST form of type TESTS and the function of type FNS.

The fix seemed simple, assigning tests to an existing type such as FNS. First I removed TESTS with (DELDEF 'TESTS 'DEFINE-TYPES), then replaced the type argument TESTS with FNS in the XCL:DEFDEFINER form. But when I tried to edit a sample test TEST.PLUS for the PLUS function with (ED 'TEST.PLUS :DONTWAIT), SEdit quit with the error:

Warning: Couldn't find a hash-table for FNS definitions.
One will be created.
Could not find fns definition for TEST.PLUS.
Could not find fns definition for
TEST.PLUS

Back to the drawing board.

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I integrated Femtounit, my Interlisp unit test framework, with the File Manager and the SEdit structure editor.

To achieve this I defined the new File Manager type TESTS for Femtounit tests and redefined DEFTEST in terms of it, then tweaked the code formatting of tests in SEdit. Now the system notices and keeps track of new and modified tests.

Here's the File Manager type menu, which SEdit pops up when opening a test, with the DEFTEST option highlighted under TESTS:

Also, now SEdit handles and properly formats test definitions like this of a function SQUARE to compute the square of its argument:

Implementing the new features was much easier than expected.

The traditional way of adding types to the File Manager, described in the Interlisp Reference Manual, involves writing a dozen functions for most of which it's not clear how they're supposed to work. Medley 1.0 added support for two easy to use File Manager type defining forms that replace all that, XCL:DEF-DEFINE-TYPE and XCL:DEFDEFINER. This code is all it took for Femtounit's new TESTS type:

(XCL:DEF-DEFINE-TYPE TESTS "Femtounit unit tests")

(XCL:DEFDEFINER (DEFTEST (:PROTOTYPE
                            (LAMBDA (NAME)
                              (AND (LITATOM NAME)
                                   `(DEFTEST ,NAME ("Arg List")
                                      "Body")))))
                TESTS
                (NAME PARAMETERS &BODY BODY)
   `(DEFINEQ (,NAME ,PARAMETERS
      (LET ((FTU.TEST.NAME (APPEND FTU.TEST.NAME (LIST ',NAME]
        ,@BODY))))

This additional tweak makes SEdit format and indent DEFTEST unit test definitions the same way as DEFUN function definitions in Common Lisp:

(SEDIT:DEF-LIST-FORMAT DEFTEST CL:DEFUN)

The simplified process is not discussed in the Interlisp Reference Manual, where I'd have expected, but in a more obscure source, the Medley 1.0 release notes from page 52 of the PDF document. My proactive reading of all the documentation paid off as it let me spot such crucial information and save a lot of work.

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Medley is a rich development environment but it's missing a test framework. Or so I thought. To fill the supposed gap I wrote Femtounit, a tiny — hence femto — unit test framework for Interlisp.

I wanted a small framework simple to port to or write for Interlisp, yet useful in practice. At less than a couple dozen lines of code, Femtounit took very little effort to design and write as it's based on the PCL test framework Peter Seibel described in Chapter 9 of his book Practical Common Lisp.

I reused much of Peter's design and code, adapting it to Interlisp and tweaking the reporting of tests. Femtounit outputs a single period character for every passed test, unlike the full report his framework prints.

Using Femtounit looks like this:

Suppose you want to test this function that returns the square of its argument:

(DEFINEQ (SQUARE (X) (TIMES X X)))

You may define a TEST.SQUARE test function like this:

(DEFTEST TEST.SQUARE ()
  (CHECK.EXPECT (EQP (SQUARE 1) 1)
                (EQP (SQUARE 2) 4)
                (EQP (SQUARE 3) 9)
                (EQP (SQUARE 4) 16)))

To run the tests, just call the function:

(TEST.SQUARE)

which will print a period character for every passed test:

....

Some documentation is at the project repo.

After I finished the initial code of Femtounit, Larry Masinter pointed out Medley does have a test framework, and quite an advanced one. This system, which the Medley documentation simply calls test system and is much more than a framework, was originally designed to test Interlisp and its environment. The code is now in one of the Medley repos.

I thought I explored every nook and cranny of Medley and its documentation, yet I missed the test system. The system is interesting in itself and I'll use it for most of my code.

But Femtounit is a fun little learning project I still want to proceed with. It'll teach me how to integrate the framework with Interlisp for editing unit test definitions with the SEdit structure editor, as well as saving the definitions to files and managing them with the make-like File Manager tool.

#femtounit #Interlisp #Lisp

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