A new package of mine arrived on CRAN yesterday, having been uploaded a few days prior on the weekend. It extends the most excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very clever and well-done diffobj package by Brodie Gaslam. Mark also tweeted about it.

The package was written to address a fairly specific need. In teaching STAT 430 at Illinois, I am relying on the powerful PrairieLearn system (developed there) to provides tests, quizzes or homework. Alton and I have put together an autograder for R (which is work in progress, more on that maybe another day), and that uses this package to provides colorized differences between supplied and expected answers in case of an incorrect answer.

Now, the aspect of providing colorized diffs when tests do not evalute to TRUE is both simple and general enough. As our approach works rather well, I decided to offer the package on CRAN as well. The small screenshot gives a simple idea, the README.md contains a larger screenshoot.

The initial NEWS entries follow below.

Changes in ttdo version 0.0.3 (2019-09-08)

• Added a simple demo to support initial CRAN upload.

Changes in ttdo version 0.0.2 (2019-08-31)

• Updated defaults for format and mode to use the same options used by diffobj along with fallbacks.

Changes in ttdo version 0.0.1 (2019-08-26)

• Initial version, with thanks to both Mark and Brodie.

Please use the GitHub repo and its issues for any questions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.