On 10/27/17 2:05 PM, ROGER GRAYDON CHRISTMAN wrote:
While teaching my introductory course in Python, I occasionally see
submissions containing the following two program lines, even before
I teach about functions and modules:
if __name__ = '__main__':
... main()
When I ask about it, I hear things like they got these from other instructors,
or from other students who learned it from their instructors, or maybe
from some on-line programming tutorial site.
I'm all on board with the first of these two lines -- and I teach it myself
as soon as I get to modules.
My question is more about the second.
Do "real" Pythonista's actually define a new function main() instead
of putting the unit test right there inside the if?
Or am I correct in assuming that this main() is just an artifact from
people who have programmed in C, C++, or Java for so long that
they cannot imagine a program without a function named "main"?
There's no need for "if __name__ == '__main__':" for unit tests. You can
let unittest or pytest discover the tests themselves, and run them.
I often write this clause:
if __name__ == '__main__':
sys.exit(main(sys.argv))
Then I can write tests that call main() to be sure it does what I think
it does.
Or, I can let setuptools entry_points handle that clause for me:
entry_points={
'console_scripts': [
'coverage = coverage.cmdline:main',
],
},
--Ned.
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