Roy Smith wrote: > Sigh. Sometimes I'm not sure which is worse. The anti-assertion > zealotry on this list, or the anti-regex zealotry.
I'm not anti-assertions. I love assertions. I wouldn't be surprised if I use assert more than you do. What I dislike is people misusing assertions. > And, yes, I know that assertions get turned off with -O (frankly, I > think that's a design flaw). We don't run with -O. Until such time as somebody decides they can speed up your code by 5% by running with optimizations turned on. Unfortunately, it's not always clear when an assert is appropriate and when it isn't. Fundamentally, if an assertion can never fail[1], then there's no point testing for it: x = [] assert x == [] and len(x) == 0 So there's always tension between "why am I testing something that can't fail?" and "but what if it does?", and different people are going to draw the line in different places. So even if you and I draw the line in different places, I can acknowledge that you seem to be using asserts the same way I would, as executable comments and for testing program invariants, and I'm sorry that my rant was aimed in your direction unnecessarily. [1] Short of hardware failure or serious bugs in the compiler, but in both those cases you can't trust the assertions to trigger correctly either. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
