[Python-Dev] the role of assert in the standard library ?

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Apr 28, 2011, at 1:27 PM, Holger Krekel wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at 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.

I've also observed that people appreciate using asserts with nose.py and py.test.


Raymond