R devel - May 1998 - error trapping

One thing I've found missing in S/R is the ability to test error trapping. I
have written a fairly extensive set of tests for my time series library but I
can only test that things work for cases where they are suppose to work. In
several places my code is suppose to recognize error conditions, like invalid
inputs, and make calls to stop() or warn(), but there is no automatic way to
check these in my test suite.

I really would like to be able to write a code testing program which would be
able to specify that I am about to generate a "stop" condition with a
given
message, then do it, then continue, accepting that that was the right result.

This is not a high priority, but it is worth keeping on the wish list.

Paul Gilbert

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On Thu, 14 May 1998, Paul Gilbert wrote:
> One thing I've found missing in S/R is the ability to test error
trapping. I
> have written a fairly extensive set of tests for my time series library but
I
> can only test that things work for cases where they are suppose to work. In
> several places my code is suppose to recognize error conditions, like
invalid
> inputs, and make calls to stop() or warn(), but there is no automatic way
to
> check these in my test suite.
> 
> I really would like to be able to write a code testing program which would
be
> able to specify that I am about to generate a "stop" condition
with a given
> message, then do it, then continue, accepting that that was the right
result.
> 
I have recently had another need for this.  If you are doing simulations
comparing your (wonderful) new method to someone else's (hopelessly
inferior)  old method and their S-PLUS code crashes about 5% of the time
then it gets very tedious to run several hundred samples
semi-interactively.  Trapping the error would be a lot more convenient
than trying to rewrite someone else's code to fail gracefully.

Of course in your own code you wouldn't dream of doing something like that
;-).

	-thomas




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