I think the real issue here is just that assertions sometimes aren't used correctly.
Assertions and exceptions are fundamentally different concepts. Assertions should be used for statements that literally should always be true. And I mean that almost mathematically, as in most assertions should be able to be logically proven. This is why they can be turned off on production servers, because they simply won't happen. Exceptions are just what the name says: exceptions. While they shouldn't happen often, exceptions do happen, and thus need to be caught and handled. Also, assertions in PHP do not have any performance overhead once they're turned off for production servers, so that won't be an issue either. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerro...@gmail.com On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 6:28 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org>wrote: > On 31/07/13 07:28, Max Semenik wrote: > > I remeber we discussed using asserts and decided they're a bad > > idea for WMF-deployed code - yet I see > > > > Warning: assert() [<a href='function.assert'>function.assert</a>]: > > Assertion failed in > > > /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.22wmf12/extensions/WikibaseDataModel/DataModel/Claim/Claims.php > > on line 291 > > The original discussion is here: > > < > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/59620 > > > > Judge for yourself. > > -- Tim Starling > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l