On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 8:44 PM, David Teresi
print(f'{value!d}') is a lot of symbols and boilerplate to type out just for a debugging statement that will be deleted later. Especially now that breakpoint() exists, I can't really see myself using this.
I also don't see the use case of it being within an f-string, because I've never had to interpolate a debug string within some other string or format it in a fancy way. You said it yourself, taking advantage of other f-string features isn't very useful in this case.
If other people can find a use for it, I'd suggest making it ita own function -- debug(value) or something similar.
There was some discussion of this back in April: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2018-April/050113.html I think the way I'd do it would be: Step 1: Take the current "lnotab" that lets us map bytecode offsets -> line numbers, and extend it with more detailed information, so that we can map e.g. a CALL operation to the exact start and end positions of that call expression in the source. This is free at runtime, and would allow more detailed tracebacks (see [1] for an example), and more detailed coverage information. It would definitely take some work to thread the necessary information through the compiler infrastructure, but I think this would be a worthwhile feature even without the debug() use case. Step 2: Add a 'debug' helper function that exploits the detailed information to reconstruct its call, by peeking into the calling frame and finding the source for the call. Of course this would be a strange and ugly thing to do for a regular function, but for a debugging helper it's reasonable. So e.g. if you had the code: total = debug(x) + debug(y / 10) The output might be: debug:myfile.py:10: 'x' is 3 debug:myfile.py:10: 'y / 10' is 7 Or if you have a clever UI, like in an IDE or ipython, maybe it overrides the debug() operator to print something like: total = debug(*x*) + debug(y / 10) ^ *3* total = debug(x) + debug(*y / 10*) ^^^^^^^ *7* (for anyone for whom the rendering is borked: on my screen the "x" on the first line and the "y / 10" on the second line are highlighted in a different font, and the carets draw an underline beneath them.) -n [1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2018-April/050137.html -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org