[Python-Dev] the role of assert in the standard library ? (original) (raw)
Floris Bruynooghe flub at devork.be
Fri Apr 29 12:41:16 CEST 2011
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On 28 April 2011 23:07, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
On Apr 28, 2011, at 1:27 PM, Holger Krekel wrote:
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote: On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote: In my opinion assert should be avoided completely anywhere else than in the tests. If this is a wrong statement, please let me know why :)
I would turn that around. The assert statement should not be used in unit tests; unit tests should use self.assertXyzzy() always. FWIW this is only true for the unittest module/pkg policy for writing and organising tests. There are other popular test frameworks like nose and pytest which promote using plain asserts within writing unit tests and also allow to write tests in functions. And judging from my tutorials and others places many people appreciate the ease of using asserts as compared to learning tons of new methods. YMMV. I've also observed that people appreciate using asserts with nose.py and py.test. They must not appreciate -O. :-)
Personaly I'd love to get rid of all of -O's meanings apart from setting debug to False. Then you can write a strip tool which could strip all docstrings, just unused docstrings (an improvement over -O), and any "dead" code resulting from setting debug to either True or False. The last thing to do is place assert statements inside a if debug block.
That way you could use the strip tool on the modules under test but not on the test modules.
Regards Floris
PS: I actually wrote some prototype code for such a strip tool last year but never finished it off, so I'm pretty sure most of this is possible.
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