Annotations

Annotations are the basic building blocks, out of which reference implementations are constructed. The annotations represent a single condition that a student’s implementation should meet, and they define a set of behaviors for responding to the passing or failing of those conditions. Annotations provide conditions not only for expecting a specific value but also for combining those expectations to form conditions on the structure of the student’s code, including the temporal relationship of values and complex boolean logic surrounding the presence or absence of those values.

All annotations are created by instantiating subclasses of the abstract Annotation class. There are five main types of annotations:

• value annotations

• relational annotations

• complexity annotations

• type annotations

• import annotations

• annotation collections

Annotation Arguments

All annotations contain some core configurations that can be set using keyword arguments in the constructor or by accessing the instance variables of that object. The table below lists these arguments.

Field Name	Keyword Argument	Type	Description
name	name	str	The name of the annotation; used to process limit; automatically set if unspecified
limit	limit	str	The maximum number of annotations with a given name to track
group	group	str	The name of a group to which this annotation belongs; for running specific groups of annotations from a reference implementation
success_message	success_message	str	A message to be displayed to the student if the annotation is satisfied
failure_message	failure_message	str	A message to be displayed to the student if the annotation is not satisfied