I Cannot Believe that Worked

January 4, 2023

The python ellipsis to the rescue.

I've always wanted to be able to write lazy debug statements in python. I am not a professional programmer/coder/software engineer. I am a hobbyist at best, a dabbler more truthfully, and I am also lazy. There is nothing I dislike more than going back and removing debug prints from code. Well, except for implementing proper logging of course.

Why couldn't I just have a flag somewhere, “DEBUG,” and the system just know to only print when I had the flag on. I would hack a debugprint function, but then I would need to retrain my muscle memory to type debugprint instead of just print.

Python has these inverted inline conditionals (I'm sure that's not what a programming language designer would call them, but see above). I use these probably too much, but they are quite nice.

Python also has this ellipsis syntactic sugar for pass. It's one character shorter, and it's also less travel time, so, again, cheaper.

I just now realized I can put the two of these together.

Behold:

print(something) if DEBUG else ...

I am so proud of myself.