Re: What do you think about Constraint modifiers?

Hi Kelly,

We haven't met, but I have imagined that you are a relative
old-timer - as am I. :-)

Back before intellisense, I think your comment would have
been correct and - in fact - that was my thought in designing
it the way I did.

However, with intellisense (or similar features in other IDEs)
the programmer is actually /invited/ to type in the meaningless
stuff, which is a bit of a bait-and-switch. Also, aside from 
the fact that it's meaningless, having too many things in the
list makes it hard to see the useful items.

Designing for intellisense-like features of IDEs is a bit
of a new ballgame for me - and I'm guessing it is for you too!

Charlie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] 
> [mailto:[email protected]] On 
> Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
> Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 5:24 PM
> To: Charlie Poole
> Cc: [email protected]; 
> [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [nunit-developer] What do you think about 
> Constraint modifiers?
> 
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Charlie Poole 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > In case you didn't know, those are the things that come 
> after the main 
> > constraint and modify how it acts. Currently we have:
> >  .Within(...)
> >  .IgnoreCase
> >  .RespectCase
> >  .AsCollection
> >  .NoClip
> >  .Comparer(...)
> >
> > These are devilishly hard to get right in the syntax. For 
> example, you 
> > can type Is.Null.IgnoreCase in the current code, which 
> makes no sense.
> 
> Even though it doesn't make sense, does it really hurt 
> anything? Does it act just as Is.Null would? If so, then I 
> see no problem allowing people to type in this foolishness.
> 
> > Before
> > putting more time into this, I wanted to ask whether you 
> use these and 
> > whether the current format works well.
> 
> I've used them a couple of times. When you need something 
> like this, you need it bad. So, even if you don't use them 
> every day, I think having something like this is ok.
> 
> > I know some people are bothered by a form that looks like a getter 
> > property modifying the state of the object, but you could also say 
> > it's just a new paradigm and get used to it. Obviously, if we 
> > abandoned the modifier syntax, we would need to find other 
> ways to do the same stuf.
> 
> It fits with the constraint syntax, and if you've gone down 
> that road to that point, why not go all the way. They can always use
> Assert.True(...) if they don't like it.
> 
> -Kelly
> 
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