[Python-Dev] PEP 553: Built-in debug() (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Wed Sep 6 10:39:09 EDT 2017

On Sep 5, 2017, at 20:15, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

Yeah, I like the idea, but I don't like the debug() name -- IIRC there's a helper named debug() in some codebase I know of that prints its arguments under certain circumstances. On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote: Maybe breakpoint() would be a better description of what settrace() actually does?

Originally I was thinking of a keyword like ‘break here’, but once (after discussion with a few folks at the sprint) I settled on a built-in function, I was looking for something concise that most directly reflected the intent. Plus I knew I wanted to mirror the sys.*hooks, so again I looked for something short. debug() was the best I could come up with!

breakpoint() could work, although would the hooks then be sys.breakpointhook() and sys.breakpointhook? Too bad we can’t just use break() :).

Guido, is that helper you’re thinking of implemented as a built-in? If you have a suggestion, it would short-circuit the inevitable bikeshedding.

This would also avoid confusion with IPython's very useful debug magic: https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/interactive/magics.html#magic-debug and which might also be worth stealing for the builtin REPL. (Personally I use it way more often than settrace().)

Interesting. I’m not an IPython user. Do you think its %debug magic would benefit from PEP 553?

(Aside: improving/expanding the stdlib debugger is something else I’d like to work on, but this is completely independent of PEP 553.)

Cheers, -Barry

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