16.5: Debugging

A Time object is well-formed if the values of minute and second are between 0 and 60 (including 0 but not 60) and if hour is positive. hour and minute should be integral values, but we might allow second to have a fraction part.

Requirements like these are called invariants because they should always be true. To put it a different way, if they are not true, something has gone wrong.

Writing code to check invariants can help detect errors and find their causes. For example, you might have a function like valid_time that takes a Time object and returns False if it violates an invariant:

def valid_time(time):
    if time.hour < 0 or time.minute < 0 or time.second < 0:
        return False
    if time.minute >= 60 or time.second >= 60:
        return False
    return True

At the beginning of each function you could check the arguments to make sure they are valid:

def add_time(t1, t2):
    if not valid_time(t1) or not valid_time(t2):
        raise ValueError('invalid Time object in add_time')
    seconds = time_to_int(t1) + time_to_int(t2)
    return int_to_time(seconds)

Or you could use an assert statement, which checks a given invariant and raises an exception if it fails:

def add_time(t1, t2):
    assert valid_time(t1) and valid_time(t2)
    seconds = time_to_int(t1) + time_to_int(t2)
    return int_to_time(seconds)

assert statements are useful because they distinguish code that deals with normal conditions from code that checks for errors.