Re: [Pyunit-interest] comments on PyUnit

[Steve P. <ste...@ya...>]

Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
> At 04:37 PM 4/23/2001 +0200, Steve Purcell wrote:
> >If the interpreter needs to be told what optimisations to make by the
> >user, there is something wrong, and opportunities are then rife for code to
> >appear that *requires* certain optimisations. Next, there'd have to be
> >pragmas, right?
> 
> I disagree. What kind of code are you writing that *requires* an 
> optimization? Presumably an optimization is a change in code generation 
> that results in exactly the same program semantics with (hopefully) faster 
> execution.

That was my point. I don't think code should ever be tied to interpreter
optimisations.

If user-controllable optimisations were added to the interpreter, people would
enter the mindset of "module x requires optimisations y,z", and then next
they would automatically but illogically scream for the kind of pragmas
that proved useless in Perl:

  use less memory;

Yeuch.

> Basically, if Python continues to couple -O with "disable assert", then I 
> will never be able to use -O even in production, because the performance 
> gain of removing assert is practically nothing and the value of catching 
> errors early is substantial.
> 
> If currently -O doesn't provide much performance gain, then I guess it's 
> not a big deal. But if a future version does, then I will want to use it 
> while keeping my asserts.


Hence my suggestion that -O be used *only* to remove asserts. Then you and I
would not use '-O' ever, and the interpreter would deal with optimisations
in a manner transparent to our code.

-Steve

-- 
Steve Purcell, Pythangelist
Get testing at http://pyunit.sourceforge.net/
Any opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of Yahoo