How to unit test internals (organization) of a data structure?

Posted by Herms on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Herms
Published on 2010-04-05T13:45:27Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 14:23 UTC
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data-structures

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unit-testing

I've started working on a little ruby project that will have sample implementations of a number of different data structures and algorithms. Right now it's just for me to refresh on stuff I haven't done for a while, but I'm hoping to have it set up kind of like Ruby Koans, with a bunch of unit tests written for the data structures but the implementations empty (with full implementations in another branch). It could then be used as a nice learning tool or code kata.

However, I'm having trouble coming up with a good way to write the tests. I can't just test the public behavior as that won't necessarily tell me about the implementation, and that's kind of important here. For example, the public interfaces of a normal BST and a Red-Black tree would be the same, but the RB Tree has very specific data organization requirements. How would I test that?

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