After I wrote my post I realized I didn't provide enough context of what I'm doing, hence it is not quite clear to any readers why the heck I would want this. The gist is this. I have a number of algorithms that perform the same task. I'm trying to assess which ones work better under which circumstances, which means I'm timing them (interested in *relative* speed, so Python is acceptable). I also have a second app which allows me to "observe" the operation of said algorithms by consuming such emitted debug objects and graphically displaying the information therein. I'm "observing" with a very fine granularity, which means a debug object is emitted between almost every single line. Naturally, if every second line is debug code (or worse, as above, 1 line of real code, 2 lines of debug code), the readability of the algorithm is horrendous, making further development a pain. Since, when I'm NOT observing the algorithms then I'm timing them, I want the debug/observe code to have minimal impact on the runtimes; instantiating some of these debug objects is rather costly.
There, hopefully this gives a better picture of my motivation. If anyone can suggest alternate way to structure such code, I'm all ears (... well, eyes, really... :) Your proposal for one-lining the code as "if debug: emit_....." occurred to me, but for readability reasons I want as visually *short* a line as possible, so it doesn't detract from the other code. The C preprocessor was particularly helpful in such "shortening". (e.g., print "foo"; DBG(DbgObj(..)); print "bar";) Hmm, with this setup you can't get any shorter than the instantiation of the DebugObject... which gives me an idea... the "if debug:" could be placed within DebugObjectBase, and all the DebugObjects inherit from it... no... wait... no good, the problem is the following case: ... # real line of code DbgObjFoo(a,b,costly_function(c)) # real line of code On a debugging/observing run, the debugging objects occasionally have their constructor values computed externally, as above, and the proposed solution would not save us from that costly computation. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
