Splitting a string

[Patrick Maupin]

On Apr 4, 4:58 am, Peter Otten <__pete... at web.de> wrote:

> Personally, though, I prefer unit tests over assertions.

IMO, the primary use cases for assertions and unit tests are not the
same.

When I have a well-defined, clearly understood specification that I am
coding to and fully implementing with the aim of producing a fully
general purpose solution that I are offering to others, unit tests are
appropriate to make sure that the code matches the spec, and even to
provide usage examples.

When I am using Python in what I would call a more personal way, for
example in an exploratory fashion to extract value from some large
mass of data, or even to do something like parsing on a subset of
another language, where I have no intention, desire, or time to
implement the entire spec, assertions are perfectly appropriate to
make sure that my code complains at a convenient point about input
data that it would not handle properly.

It is often the case that a more personal project will grow up and
become more general purpose and widely used.  At this point, it is
appropriate to remove assertions, add unit tests, etc., but to
complain about not having unit tests in the first place is to avoid
acknowledging that there may be a higher cost associated with unit
tests than with assertions, especially with immature code that may be
severely refactored several times before settling on the best
solution.

Regards,
Pat