What's the overhead of assertion or debug statements in Python?

[Daniel Eloff]

I've just started programming with Python, but I've heard it has a
feature rare among interpreted languages - Debug statements.]

 

According to the docs, assert() produces no code if optimization is
enabled.

 

My question is, is the same true for

 

if __debug__:

            print "Reached this region of code", some_debug_func()

else:

            pass

 

Is there any overhead associated with this at runtime? Any branching or
run time evaluation of the value of __debug__?

 

I'm trying to discover if I can litter my code with debug stuff, or if I
should go sparingly in performance critical code like some innermost
loops.

 

Also, how can I enable and disable optimization?

 

Thanks,

-Dan

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