[Bioperl-l] evalues/floating point tests

[Chris Fields]

On Jan 19, 2009, at 1:33 AM, Chad Davis wrote:

> I would like to suggest, once the naming issue has been resolved,  
> that this
> also be sent on to the Test::More people. Seems it would be generally
> useful, beyond Bioperl, to validate floating point numbers in tests.  
> I'm
> doing this by hand in my current tests with something like:
>
> $tolerance = 0.001;
> ok($got < $expected + $tolerance && $got > $expected - $tolerance,  
> "Within
> tolerated rounding error ...");
>
> ... which is a very indirect workaround.

The method is just a simple wrapper around is() like so:

is(sprintf("%g",$val1), sprintf("%g",$val2), $msg);

It captures possibly undef values and performs a simple is() on them.

If we needed we can add an extra parameter that indicates the level of  
precision:

sub float_is ($$$;$) {
     my ($val1, $val2, $precision, $msg) = @_;
     # after some routine checks
     is(sprintf("%.${precision}g",$val1), sprintf("%.${precision}g", 
$val2), $msg);
}

> And if anyone is counting, I also vote for Mark's  
> "float_is" ("float" being
> the adjective modifying the type of "is", rather than a predicate,  
> which can
> become confusing, as you noted).

Agreed.  Any dissent?  Again, I can change that but once it's in then  
it's a done deal.

> Thanks for all the work on 1.6,
> Cheers,
> Chad

Thanks Chad.  I've looked on the Test::Simple/More google list to see  
if implementing something similar has been suggested in the past but  
nothing popped up.  I'll post something and see what schwern says.

chris