On Friday, 1 August 2014 at 03:58:22 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
If you look at the Wikipedia article,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assertion_(software_development)
you'll see a more high level view of what assert is all about,
rather than a worm's eye view the C standard takes. (It even
uses C for its examples.) Up until this thread, I've never
encountered someone who thought differently about it.
I just read that and it matches my idea of what asserts are all
about. But nowhere could I see any mention of asserts being a
promise to the compiler that it could then reason from. The
article mentions reasoning but I read that as human reasoning.
This sentence:
"The use of assertions helps the programmer design, develop, and
reason about a program."
To me sums it up. I dislike the idea of the compiler reasoning
from the assertions because, to me, it hinders the programmer's
ability to develop a program.
That said: From what Jonathan has said, it sound like this
argument could be recast as one about what the "-release" option
means. If it's avoidable without losing other optimizations, I
don't feel hindered in any way, and this is just a question about
user surprise, naming and documentation.
