Haskell Language QuickCheck Limiting the size of test data
Example
It can be difficult to test functions with poor asymptotic complexity using quickcheck as the random inputs are not usually size bounded. By adding an upper bound on the size of the input we can still test these expensive functions.
import Data.List(permutations)
import Test.QuickCheck
longRunningFunction :: [a] -> Int
longRunningFunction xs = length (permutations xs)
factorial :: Integral a => a -> a
factorial n = product [1..n]
prop_numberOfPermutations xs =
longRunningFunction xs == factorial (length xs)
ghci> quickCheckWith (stdArgs { maxSize = 10}) prop_numberOfPermutations
By using quickCheckWith with a modified version of stdArgs we can limit the size of the inputs to be at most 10. In this case, as we are generating lists, this means we generate lists of up to size 10. Our permutations function doesn't take too long to run for these short lists but we can still be reasonably confident that our definition is correct.
