On 4/28/11 3:27 PM, Holger Krekel wrote:
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.)
Regardless of whether those frameworks encourage it, it's still the wrong thing
to do for the reason that Guido states. Some bugs only show up under -O, so you
ought to be running your test suite under -O, too.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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