Testing Properties of Generic Functions

A datatype-generic function is a family of functions indexed by (the structure of) a type. Examples include equality tests, maps and pretty printers. Property based testing tools like QuickCheck and Gast support the definition of properties and test-data generators, and they check if a monomorphic property is satisfied by the test cases. Generic functions satisfy generic properties and this paper discusses specifying and testing such properties. It shows how generic properties and generators can be expressed, and explains three bugs we found and corrected in the Generic Haskell library

Testing properties of generic functions

Abstract A datatype-generic function is a family of functions indexed by (the structure of) a type. Examples of generic functions are equality tests, maps and pretty printers. QuickCheck is one of the most advanced tools for testing properties of functional programs. It supports the definition of properties and random test-data generators in Haskell, and checks if a monomorphic property is satisfied by the test cases. Generic functions satisfy generic properties and this paper discusses specifying and testing such properties. It shows how generic properties can be formulated, and how QuickCheck can be used to test generic properties. Furthermore, it shows how to automatically generate QuickCheck generators using Generic Haskell.

Testing properties of generic functions

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