[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 282 comments (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Fri, 22 Mar 2002 01:28:25 -0500

[Aahz]

Hrm. Based on previous comments, particularly from the Timbot, I'm wondering whether the linkage between !debugging and optimizing is too tight in Python,

It is, and they're not the same thing in reality.

and whether constructs like this should be deprecated.

In favor of what? It (debug) serves a useful purpose now; that's why it's being used, after all.

Seems to me that there will definitely be times you want debugging output when you're running -O.

As was lamented recently on c.l.py, it's also the case that when developing a large system, you often want to enable asserts only in a small subset of the newer modules. People used to approximate that by setting debug explicitly to 0 or 1 on a per-module basis, but that's been deprecated (to the point of extinction, although Martin will point out that you can still fool the compiler by setting debug indirectly via the module dict).

I doubt there are any easy answers here. But please don't let that stop you from just solving it .