On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.ta...@gmail.com> wrote: >> In my opinion assert should be avoided completely anywhere else than >> in the tests. If this is a wrong statement, please let me know why :) > > I would turn that around. The assert statement should not be used in > unit tests; unit tests should use self.assertXyzzy() always.
FWIW this is only true for the unittest module/pkg policy for writing and organising tests. There are other popular test frameworks like nose and pytest which promote using plain asserts within writing unit tests and also allow to write tests in functions. And judging from my tutorials and others places many people appreciate the ease of using asserts as compared to learning tons of new methods. YMMV. Holger > regular code, assert should be about detecting buggy code. It should > not be used to test for error conditions in input data. (Both these > can be summarized as "if you still want the test to happen with -O, > don't use assert.) > > -- > --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) > _______________________________________________ > Python-Dev mailing list > Python-Dev@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > Unsubscribe: > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/holger.krekel%40gmail.com > _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
