The main reason not to use assertions is that they can be disabled at
runtime, rendering them fairly useless IMO. Personally, I would remove
the null parameter checking entirely and let the code throw a NPE. The
caller will see their offending method in the stack trace.
David
--- Chris Lambrou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Although I've marked the subject with [collections], I guess this is
> targeted at anyone who has an interest in a Java 5.0 port of any jakarta
>
> project. I'm slowly chipping away at a Java 5.0 port of
> commons-collections. As I've been generifying the original collections
> classes, I've found apart from a little bit of tidying here and there,
> I've mostly been leaving the argument checking code at the start of most
>
> constructors and/or factory methods alone. It's just occured to me that
>
> all of these checks are explicit checks that throw some subclass of
> RuntimeException. For example:
>
> protected ClosureTransformer(Closure<? super E> closure)
> {
> if (closure == null) {
> throw new IllegalArgumentException("Closure must not be
> null");
> }
> this.closure = closure;
> }
>
> Since JDK1.4, the assert keyword has been available to replace this type
>
> of error checking, but obviously it's not been used in collections in
> order to maintain backwards compatibility with earlier versions of the
> JDK. With the move to Java 5.0, backwards compatibility is no longer a
> concern, and I'm considering replacing all such runtime argument checks
> with assertions. For example:
>
> protected ClosureTransformer(Closure<? super E> closure)
> {
> assert closure != null : "Closure must not be null";
> this.closure = closure;
> }
>
> I've heard both sides of the explict-check-and-RuntimeException versus
> Assertions argument before in what feels like the dim and distant past,
> but the discussion has always included the backwards compatibility
> slant. I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the matter in
> light of Java 5.0
>
> Chris
>
>
> P.S. If anyone's interested, the JDK 1.5 port of collections is
> currently hosted on SourceForge at http://collections15.sourceforge.net
> - I'd be interested in any feedback, particularly on the new generic
> interfaces in the main package.
>
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