I asked on the core-mentorship list about pydev test philosophy. I got useful answers from Nick and Antoine that can be summarized as "We are pragmatic, not dogmatic." One may have to be a list member to read this link, but here it is.
http://mail.python.org/mailman/private/core-mentorship/2013-June/001855.html

I tried out multiple test methods, but decided that I preferred the continuous scenario in the patch that follows.

Because the code was written before the addition of sets, the private cache was a dict used as a set. I changed it to a set.