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Still not convinced :-) (Score:1)
The efficiency argument doesn't persuade me.
If you need ordering for the production code then it's needed by the problem domain and it obviously makes sense.
If ordering is not needed by the production code and just makes the test more convenient to write then it smells to me. You're unnecessarily exposing implementation details to the test suite.
You're also swapping slower tests for slower production code, which seems a bad exchange.
Also, unless you're adding indices to the columns in question, this could really slow down the production code quite a bit. Databases can be surprisingly dumb about this sort of thing. So now we're having to add extra indices that are only needed for the test suite - slowing down the commits and updates!
Finally if we decide at a later date that some sort of ordering is important, and that ordering differs from our 'test order', then all of our tests break. Nasty.
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Re:Still not convinced :-) (Score:2)
I think I should have been clearer about the "apply logic as early as possible" rule. I'm not advovating applying unecessary logic. I'm advocating applying the logic as early as is reasonable. If you need your database records sorted, sort them in the database, if possible. This discussion, to be quite frank, came from me working on some code which returns records in database order and is sorted after it's fetched, but this led to places in the code where it should have been sorted, but wasn't. I was v
Re:Still not convinced :-) (Score:1)
You don't care in which order you pull the Scrabble tiles out of the bag, only that it contains nothing more or less than a complete set.
Re:Still not convinced :-) (Score:1)
What chromatic said :-) Things like eq_set from Test::More or cmp_set and cmp_bag from Test::Deep.