On Wed, Oct 3, 2018, 03:55 Eric V. Smith
On 10/3/2018 1:40 AM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
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
I'm not positive, but isn't this what q does?
The difference is that without "step 1", there's no reliable way to figure out the value's source text. q does it by grabbing the source line and making some guesses based on heuristics, but e.g. in the example here it gets confused and prints: 0.0s <module>: x) + q(y / 10=3 0.0s <module>: x) + q(y / 10=7 So you can think of this idea as (1) make it possible to implement a reliable version of q, (2) add an built-in implementation. -n