I just thought I would put my 2 cents in on this issue. Others have suggested that unit tests are an excellent way of debugging your code and I agree. I also find that writing code from the outset using a logging class (there is one in the standard library) that allows you to create log files of information as you run your application is a good idea. Using increasingly detailed logs (I use a debug mode of 1,2,3,4 for more detail) that dump where you are and intermediate variable values works EXTREMELY well for me. I leave this code in the application so that I can have customers (or myself) run the application in debug mode should I have a hard to find problem. This is especially true for long running or lights-out batch apps that have no UI making debugging even more difficult. I find that the overhead of testing if I'm in debug mode and logging results is almost non-existent to the overall execution speed of my scripts, but then I don't have very many really speed sensitive scripts so your mileage might vary.
Hope the information helps. -Larry -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
