status of Programming by Contract (PEP 316)?

[Russ]

> I guess one difference from unit test philosophy is > that at least
> sometime, you'd run the entire application with all > the dbc checks
> enabled, and just live with the slowdown.

Yes, that's right. You don't expect to run efficiently with the self-
test checks activated, but you can test your code more conveniently
and comprehensively than unit tests by simply running your program as
usual -- except with the checks activated. If you do that for any
significant period of time, many bugs will find themselves, I'm sure.

Also, to repeat once again, the embedded self-test (DbC) checks can be
used for unit testing too. You simply activate the self-tests when you
do your unit testing, and wait for them to throw exceptions. So it
seems to me that you've killed two birds with one stone.