[Python-ideas] hookable assertions - to support testing utilities and debugging (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Feb 19 12:32:26 CET 2015

On 19 February 2015 at 21:16, Ronny Pfannschmidt <opensource at ronnypfannschmidt.de> wrote:

Im aware, my intent is to standardize the mechanism and push it into the language,

Unfortunately, you're faced with a lot of C programmers firmly of the opinion that if you care about whether or not a piece of code gets executed, you don't put it it in an assert statement. It's a giant flashing red sign that says "This code is just checking something that should always be true, you don't actually need to read it in order to understand what this code is doing, but the assumption it documents may be helpful if something is puzzling you".

So from my perspective (being one of the aforementioned C programmers), I see this question as not so much about the assert statement per se, but rather a more philosophical question:

(FWIW, I'm personally inclined to answer the first two questions with "yes", but haven't got any ideas as far as the third one goes)

Making the behaviour of assert statements configurable attempts to duck those questions instead of answering them, so I don't see at as a particularly useful approach - it makes the language more complex without providing additional clarity, rather than figuring out how to encode a genuinely important categorical distinction between test code and production code into the design of the language.

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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