On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 9:28 AM, Phil Frost <ind...@bitglue.com>
wrote:
> Rather than make guesses that are right 90% of the time and yield 10%
> false positives, pyflakes takes the PEP 20 approach:
...
> It is the opinion of pyflakes that determining the correctness of your
> program in such complex situations is better served by unit tests.
Thanks for the response. How would a unit test tell me a particular
method or data attribute is unused within the module? And if the
attribute used to be used, but no longer is (and should be deleted to
ease maintenance), does a unit test keep it alive?
The main Python code base I work with is now more than 10 years old,
and was not designed at the outset to easily support the creation of
unit tests. (Numbers-wise, it's nearly 50kloc in over 200 Python
files.) It also grew organically as requirements and focus of the
code changed. I'm sure there's now a ton of unused code in there I
could just discard. Finding it can be a challenge. Just because an
attribute isn't used within a module doesn't mean it's dead, but in
certain situations it would be nice if a checker could at least warn
me, "hey, I see that you assigned to 'self.foo', but I don't see any
obvious uses of that attribute within the class or module." I would
be more than happy with a 90% hit rate on such stuff. I don't care
about perfection here. I don't care about the craziness of assigning
something bizarre to "self" or use of getattr and its cousins. I also
would be happy if I needed to set a config variable or add a command
line flag to enable such behavior.
And if we are using the Zen of Python as our guide:
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
I'm looking for practicality here, not purity.
Skip
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