On 4/28/11 3:27 PM, Holger Krekel wrote:
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:59 PM, Guido van Rossumguido@python.org wrote:
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Tarek Ziadéziade.tarek@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.