Julia: Cannot define types inside a @testset

[staticfloat]

If I do:

julia> begin
           struct foo
               bar
           end
       end

Everything is fine, however if I make this a @testset, I get:

julia> @testset "Baz" begin
           struct foo
               bar
           end
       end
ERROR: error compiling anonymous: type definition not allowed inside a local scope

It would be nice to be able to define types within a testset.

[StefanKarpinski]

It would probably be fine if the @testset macro hoisted the type definition out of its scope and just evaled it in global scope (once, presumably).

[staticfloat]

Yes, the only point of subtlety is that I would like the type definition itself to happen within the test set error handling domain, as I want to test things like @io struct Foo for StructIO

[mauro3]

Could the testset define a module? Then the global runtest.jl scope would not be polluted.

[NHDaly]

Have there been any more thoughts on this since last year? I agree this would be really nice.

In particular, @testsets defining a module seems nice. Are there any problems that would come from that?

[fredrikekre]

In particular, @testsets defining a module seems nice.

Don't you then have to using MyPackage, Test, etc for each @testset?

[NHDaly]

ah good point. Thanks.

Well, if it's not _entirely_ crazy, the inner, automatically created module could be set to a deepcopy of the outer module, so that it'd just be like creating a new scope. Modules don't currently have a deepcopy function defined, but it's not hard to define one. I know copying/embedding modules like this isn't something that's usually done in normal julia, but it's something I've putzed with before.

[NHDaly]

But also, unrelated to the Module idea.. how does the include mechanism work? You can include a file from within a function or within a @testset, and the file you include can do top-level stuff like define structs. Can we use whatever mechanism it's using?

[staticfloat]

Don't you then have to using MyPackage, Test, etc for each @testset?

IMO this is where a import ..: * would be really useful. Our scoping rules implicitly do this, I feel we should be able to do this at the module level as well.