"Try it now"

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:04:25 -0400, Adam D. Ruppe  
<destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the other hand, having output there might be more interesting
> to look at than "yay the asserts all passed!".

I think this is a good point.  Someone playing with a language might type  
in the example, and do:

/home/steves> dmd example.d
/home/steves> ./example
/home/steves> (ok... I guess that worked, but I'm not sure what happened)

In other words, there is a benefit to the interaction with the learner.   
In other words, you get to "see it working", rather than only see when it  
fails.  You also get a confirmation that the compiler is actually building  
something.  For the above code, all one really knows is that the compiler  
made an executable.  There's no confirmation that the code being run is  
actually what you typed in.

Sometimes, I worry that my unit tests or asserts aren't running.  Every  
once in a while, I have to change one to fail to make sure that code is  
compiling (this is especially true when I'm doing version statements or  
templates).  It would be nice if there was a -assertprint mode which  
showed asserts actually running (only for the module compiled with that  
switch, of course).

-Steve