Why doesn't JUnit provide assertNotEquals methods?

Question

Does anybody know why JUnit 4 provides assertEquals(foo,bar) but not assertNotEqual(foo,bar) methods?

It provides assertNotSame

Answer 1

I'd suggest you use the newer assertThat() style asserts, which can easily describe all kinds of negations and automatically build a description of what you expected and what you got if the assertion fails:

assertThat(objectUnderTest, is(not(someOtherObject)));
assertThat(objectUnderTest, not(someOtherObject));
assertThat(objectUnderTest, not(equalTo(someOtherObject)));

All three options are equivalent, choose the one you find most readable.

To use the simple names of the methods (and allow this tense syntax to work), you need these imports:

import static org.junit.Assert.*;
import static org.hamcrest.CoreMatchers.*;