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Do Programmers Actually Use Assertions?
P.Chalin queries: "Do programmers actually use assertions (like the assert statement of various programming languages)? If so, what should be done when errors or exceptions are raised during the evaluation of an assertion? I am collecting opinions and stats via a short questionnaire. Thanks."
Sorry, but this is an extremely naive way of coding, in my opinion. Errors occur for a reason; if you don't do something about their existence, you're likely to start experiencing unexpected problems. Crash early crash often isn't a joke; it's far better to die when you can gracefully than it is to ignore all errors and crash losing data.
No comment.
If an assertion can fail under normal circumstances in released code, assert is being misused. IMHO, the idea behind an assertion is to prevent violations of preconditions set down in the code from occurring. These preconditions do not cover runtime conditions, such as memory errors; that's the sort of thing that exception handling should be used for. An assertion indicates something that you are doing wrong rather than a problem with the environment.