Clarity vs. code reuse/generality

[J. Cliff Dyer]

On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 11:57 -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
> On 2009-07-10 11:50, J. Cliff Dyer wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 02:57 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> >> On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:28:04 +0100, Nobody wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:57:15 -0300, Gabriel Genellina wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Nobody says you shouldn't check your data. Only that "assert" is not
> >>>> the right way to do that.
> >>> "assert" is not the right way to check your *inputs*. It's a perfectly
> >>> reasonable way to check data which "should" be valid, as well as a way
> >>> to document what variables are supposed to contain.
> >> Where are those variables coming from?
> >>
> >> The distinction really boils down to this:
> >>
> >> * asserts should never fail. If there is any chance that an assertion
> >> might fail outside of test suites, then don't use assert.
> >>
> >
> > I'm no expert, but the more I read this thread, and the more I think on
> > it, the more I believe that asserts don't really need to exist outside
> > of test suites.
> 
> Actually, there is a good argument that one shouldn't use an assert statement in 
> test suites: code can have bugs that only show up under -O so you want to be 
> able to run your test suite under -O.
> 

That's an interesting point.  Presumably TestCase.assert_() doesn't
suffer from this defect?  Otherwise the entire unittest suite is
essentially broken by your argument.  I suppose I should have said one
should only raise AssertionErrors in test suites.  Practically speaking,
that's what a test suite is:  The place where you assert what the code
does.