Avoiding a test count seems to be the trend in Perl modules these days. After all, automated test libraries in other languages don’t have anything similar, and they seem to get by fine. If the test fails in the middle, that can be detected by a non-zero exit code. It’s always felt like annoying bookkeeping, so why bother?

For simple tests like the above, I think that’s fine. Failing with a non-zero exit code has worked reliably for me in the past.

However, there’s one place where I think TAP had the right idea way back in 1988: event driven or otherwise asynchronous code. Systems like this have been popping up in Perl over the years, but naturally, it’s Node.js that has built an entire ecosystem around the concept. Here’s one of my tests that uses a callback system: