cascading python executions only if return code is 0

[Roy Smith]

On Monday, December 23, 2013 12:05:22 PM UTC-5, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Roy Smith wrote:

> > And, yes, I know that assertions get turned off with -O (frankly, I
> > think that's a design flaw).  We don't run with -O.
> 
> 
> Until such time as somebody decides they can speed up your code by 5% by
> running with optimizations turned on.

Well, there's lots of changes people could make that would break things.  Many of them are in the name of efficiency. [1]  But, let's say they did that.  We would fall off the end of the function, return None, and the caller would end up doing:

with None:
    whatever

leaving somebody to puzzle over why the logs contained a stack dump ending in:

AttributeError: __exit__

So, here's the deeper question.  Is your issue strictly that -O elides assert statements? [2]  That's a purely mechanical issue that could be solved by using the rather more verbose:

if not condition:
    raise AssertionError("....")

Would you feel differently then?

> So there's always tension between "why am I testing something that can't
> fail?" and "but what if it does?"

Trust, but verify.  Especially when the thing you're verifying is your understanding of how your own code works :-)

[1] and most of those are premature optimizations.  To a first order approximation, for us, application speed is all about database performance, and not at all about Python code execution speed.  That's a pretty good second order approximation as well.

[2] In which case, we would just add some middleware which did:

assert "-O" not in sys.argv