Holger Krekel and Armin Rigo have been working on a "complementary second standard library" for Python. They want to make the standard library more Pythonic, rather than Java-like. Their motto is that "the best API is the one that doesn't exist."

And, indeed, their unit testing framework, std.utest, is mostly non-existent to the application programmer. Consider this simple routine, in a module named, say, list.py:

 def matching_names(prefix, names):
     """Case insensitive match."""
     
     prefix = prefix.upper()
     return [name for name in names
             if name.upper().startswith(prefix)]
 

Now, to test it with std.utest we make a module named test_list.py, and its complete listing is this:

 from list import matching_names
 

 def test_matching_names():
     names = ["abc", "Abac", "baca", "bbb"]
     assert matching_names("a", names) == ["abc", "Abac"]
     assert matching_names("ab", names) == ["abc", "Abac"]
     assert matching_names("ba", names) == ["bac"]
 

No special imports, no classes (although you can use a class to organize your tests if you want), no inheritance, no test runners, no suites. Running this with std.utest's supplied test runner (you can write your own if necessary) is as simple as this:

 python ..\std\bin\utest
 

Which spits out this:

 inserting C:\Documents and Settings\Jarno Virtanen
 _______________________________________________________________________________
 ______________________________  TESTS STARTING  ______________________________
 _______________________________________________________________________________
 F
 

 _______________________________________________________________________________
 ________________________________ Test Failure ________________________________
 

 >>> test_matching_names
 >>> 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\Jarno Virtanen\\cd\\test_list.py', line 9
 

 def test_matching_names():
     names = ["abc", "Abac", "baca", "bbb"]
     assert matching_names("a", names) == ["abc", "Abac"]
     assert matching_names("ab", names) == ["abc", "Abac"]
 >   assert matching_names("ba", names) == ["bac"]
 

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 assert ['baca'] == ['bac']
  +  where ['baca'] = matching_names('ba', ['abc', 'Abac', 'baca', 'bbb'])
 ============================== 1 TESTS FINISHED ==============================
 0.05 seconds (0 passed, 1 failed, 0 skipped)
 

Notice how std.utest magically deduces what exactly was compared, in the runtime, in the failing assertion. It also shows how the tested routine was called by.

Unfortunately, no one has yet written much documentation about the complementary standard library. You pretty much have to figure it out yourself, but, as you saw, it's not too difficult once the basic idea is revealed.

The only way (that I know of) to obtain it right now is to use Subversion and check out the project like this:

 svn co http://codespeak.net/svn/std/trunk/src/std