Testing SML

I’m currently taking a course on Programming Languages, by Dan Grossman, which you can find for free here.

The assignments use Standard ML of New Jersey, which I had no previous experience with. The first thing in my mind was how to test the code, so I would feel confortable trying different things while solving the problems.

Some people in the course are using SMLUnit (which requires python), but there is information on how to set it up without python in this blog post by Jeanne Boyarsky, a course student.

I chose to use sml-testing instead. So here is my setup:

First create and change into a working folder:

$ cd ~/development
$ mkdir -p coursera
$ cd coursera

Clone the sml-testing repo and cd into it:

$ git clone git@github.com:kvalle/sml-testing.git sml
$ cd sml

I chose to put my homework inside this same folder, since I still don’t know how to organize code in ML. So I created a test file like this:

use "testing.sml";
open SmlTests;

use "hw1.sml";

test("is_older: true if first year is older",
  assert_true(is_older((2000, 0, 0), (2010, 0, 0))));

run();

And of course a file hw1.sml with my solutions.

Also, I wrote this shell script (run-tests.sh), which gives a green message for passing tests, a red list of failing tests or the whole output if there is a different error (like compilation):

#!/usr/bin/env bash

file="$1"

bldred=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 1) #  red
bldgre=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 2) #  green
txtrst=$(tput sgr0)             # Reset

output=$(sml < "$file")

if [[ "$output" == *"TESTS PASSED"* ]]; then
  echo $bldgre
  echo "ALL TESTS PASSED"
else
  if [[ "$output" == *"FAILED:"* ]]; then
    echo $bldred
    echo "$output" | sed -n '/FAILED:/,$p'
  else
    echo "$output"
  fi
fi
echo $txtrst

Which you can run like this (after chmod +x run-tests.sh):

./run-tests.sh hw1-test.sml

Of with fswatch on osx (brew install fswatch):

fswatch . "./run-tests.sh hw1-test.sml"

Which will run all tests for you whenever you make changes to a file in the current folder.

And that’s it. Happy functional programming!