On Wednesday, 3 February 2021 at 18:24:06 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
Is there a short explanation of why this was done and what it
enables?
Personally I'm excited to see this...
Strangely enough there is a long running 'net wide disagreement
on what an assert is or does.
Some regard it as purely a debugging tool used as a programmer
aid that is expressly turned on by the programmer, and others
(such as myself) regard it as a way of stating, and enforcing the
contract, provided by an API.
And as such, people with the latter mindset wish the compiler
would warn us if that contract is potentially violated on any
path, and conversely, wish the optimizer to act on the
information it provides.
By adding it to the type system, it expresses and clarifies the
intent of the author of the code, and expresses it in the
compilers terms, ie. a type.
In my day job, I have found the only resolution to the
disagreement is to create two different facilities with two
different names to permit the two groups of humans to get along.
In my day job instead of "assert" we now have "log_If....()" that
are opt-in programmer debugging tools and "error_Check...()" that
enforce.
