On Monday, 6 June 2022 at 06:56:46 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Monday, 6 June 2022 at 06:14:59 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
Those are not places where you would put an assert.
The only place to put an assert is when *you* know there is no
recovery.
No, asserts are orthogonal to recovery. They just specify the
assumed constraints in the implementation of the algorithm. You
can view them as comments that can be read by a computer and
checked for that specific function.
I guess an informal way to express this is:
*Asserts are comments that you would need to make when explaining
why the algorithm works to another person (or to convince
yourself that it works).*
As far as unnecessary asserts, it would be nice to have something
more powerful than static assert, something that could reason
about runtime issues that are simple and issue errors if it could
not establish it. E.g.:
```
int i = 0;
…later…
i++;
…much later…
compiletime_assert(i>0);
```
