Agree - with python pretty printer and disabled watch scripts, everything is fine.
But my goal is to provide students a self-contained, reasonable size .zip that they can unpack and run. Don't really want to try to shoehorn Python into that (haven't researched to see how big a package would be needed, but guessing it won't be trivial sized). Hence the desire to stick with the old school watch scripts - also since we are talking about a package targeted at relatively inexperienced students, why I don't want to say "just add a random call to foo.c_str() if you need to debug it".
Spent a while trying every lead I could find to disable the optimizations in gcc 4.7.1 and nothing seemed to work. If anyone knows the magic words to disable, please let me know.