So I have some assert statements in my code to verify the absence of some "impossible" conditions. They were useful in debugging and of course I left them in place for "real" runs of the program. Umpteen hours into a run, an assertion failed, and of course since failure was "impossible", I didn't catch the exception so the whole program crashed. I don't know what I'd have done with the exception anyway, since it would have had to be caught at an outer scope where the data I cared about was no longer around, or else I'd have had to predict in advance what I needed to examine and pass that as a an arg to the assert statement.
What I really want is for any assertion failure, anywhere in the program, to trap to the debugger WITHOUT blowing out of the scope where the failure happened, so I can examine the local frame. That just seems natural, but I don't see an obvious way to do it. Am I missing something? I guess I could replace all the assertions with function calls that launch pdb, but why bother having an assert statement? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
