Is this different than what you would expect?

Supplying garbage to timeit will result in an error:

>>> from timeit import timeit
>>> timeit('weofinwofinwe')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/timeit.py", line 232, in timeit
    return Timer(stmt, setup, timer, globals).timeit(number)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/timeit.py", line 176, in timeit
    timing = self.inner(it, self.timer)
  File "<timeit-src>", line 6, in inner
NameError: name 'weofinwofinwe' is not defined


If you want to time an empty loop, you can use:

>>> timeit('pass', number=10000)
0.0001043230000021822