[Python-ideas] Dump .pyo and the "optimize" flag

[Mark Dickinson]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:42 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 13:05, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> Le mercredi 03 février 2010 à 06:58 +1000, Nick Coghlan a écrit :
>>>
>>> The fact that asserts and if __debug__ blocks get skipped under -O
>>> strikes me as more than adequate reason to consider optimised and
>>> non-optimised bytecode as different things.
>>
>> Well, do people rely on this nowadays?
>> With unit testing becoming very common (and recommended) practice, I'm
>> not sure what sprinkling asserts in debug mode really brings.
>
> We might not rely on them, but I am sure there are those who prefer
> them on top of TDD (or instead of).  [...]

FWIW, I'm one of 'those':  I find there are assert uses that can't be
covered as neatly or directly with unit tests.  They're great for
documenting loop invariants in complicated algorithms, for example:

def xgcd(b, c):
    """Extended Euclidean algorithm: return integers g, x and y such that
    b*x + c*y == g and g is a greatest common divisor of b and c."""
    g1, g2 = b, c
    x1, x2 = 1, 0
    y1, y2 = 0, 1
    while g2:
        assert x1 * b + y1 * c == g1 and x2 * b + y2 * c == g2
        q = g1 // g2
        g1, g2 = g2, g1 - q*g2
        x1, x2 = x2, x1 - q*x2
        y1, y2 = y2, y1 - q*y2
    return g1, x1, y1

(Not that the above counts as a complicated algorithm, of course.)

Mark