On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 09:19:45 +0000, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch wrote: > On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:41:55 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >> I have a class with a method meant to verify internal program logic >> (not data supplied by the caller). Because it is time-consuming but >> optional, I treat it as a complex assertion statement, and optimize it >> away if __debug__ is false: ... >> What do others >> think? Which do you consider better design? > > None of it. Why not simply: > > class Parrot: > def __init__(self, *args): > print "Initialising instance..." > assert self._verify() > > def _verify(self): > print "Verifying..." > return None
For your method to work, I'd have to have _verify return a boolean flag instead of None, because assert None always fails. > If you compile with -O the ``assert`` is optimized away. But you still > can call `_verify()` at specific points even in optimized code if you > want or need. That's a reasonable approach, if my use-case was for the caller to call the verify method. It's not: it's verifying my program logic rather than the caller's data, and it's only meaningful to do that verification at initialisation time. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
