Sort of an odd way to debug...

[Chris Mellon]

On 9/4/07, xkenneth <xkenneth at gmail.com> wrote:
> All,
>
>     Sorry for the vague topic, but I really didn't know how to
> describe what I want to do. I'd like to almost do a traceback of my
> code for debugging and I thought this would be a really cool way to do
> it if possible.
>
> What I'd like to do, is define a base class. This base class would
> have a function, that gets called every time another function is
> called (regardless of whether in the base class or a derived class),
> and prints the doc string of each function whenever it's called. I'd
> like to be able to do this without explicitly specifying the function
> inside all of the other functions of a base class or derived class.
>
> Here's what I think it would look like:
>
> class Base:
>      __init__(self,debug=False):
>             if debug:
>                 self.debug = debug
>
>      def functionThatAlwaysGetsCalled(self):
>            print self.__docstring__
>
> class Derived(Base):
>     """This function prints something"""
>     def printSometing(something)
>          #ghost function get's called here
>          print something
>
> Output would be:
> This function prints something
> something
>
> Thanks for any help!
>

This approach won't work, because you need cooperation from child
classes to trigger your  printing. A trace function (see sys.settrace)
is probably more useful.