We already report the differences even in diff format, and the scripts can get long. The output of assertEqual was not useful, therefore it's eliminated.
This test suite has been in use for a long time now, in place of the obsolete and unmanageable testparser.py and testfuncs.py. It verifies the complete optimizer output to stdout and stderr, to ensure that the output matches the expectations.
See unit_tests/README.txt for more info.