“assert” statement with or without parentheses

Here are four simple invocations of assert:

>>> assert 1==2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AssertionError

>>> assert 1==2, "hi"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AssertionError: hi

>>> assert(1==2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
AssertionError

>>> assert(1==2, "hi")

Note that the last one does not raise an error. What is the difference between calling assert with or without parenthesis that causes this behavior? My practice is to use parenthesis, but the above suggests that I should not.

Answer

The last assert would have given you a warning (SyntaxWarning: assertion is always true, perhaps remove parentheses?) if you ran it through a full interpreter, not through IDLE. Because assert is a keyword and not a function, you are actually passing in a tuple as the first argument and leaving off the second argument.

Recall that non-empty tuples evaluate to True, and since the assertion message is optional, you’ve essentially called assert True when you wrote assert(1==2, "hi").