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 wonder same. The API of Assert is not very symmetric; for testing whether objects are the same, it provides assertSame and assertNotSame.

Of course, it is not too long to write:

assertFalse(foo.equals(bar));

With such an assertion, the only informative part of the output is unfortunately the name of the test method, so descriptive message should be formed separately:

String msg = "Expected <" + foo + "> to be unequal to <" + bar +">";
assertFalse(msg, foo.equals(bar));

That is of course so tedious, that it is better to roll your own assertNotEqual. Luckily in future it will maybe be part of the JUnit: JUnit issue 22