>I know this is an assert rather than exception handling, but I really
>dislike having System.exits in the code.
+1 to the suggestion to throw an exception instead. System.exit() is a pain
when debugging code (you can't get the stack-trace information which might
otherwise help you understand why the assertion failed, unless you find and
breakpoint every instance of this call), and is generally _not_ what you
want in something that may be called from a long-running server (the fact
that one transform crashed is generaly not a good reason to take down the
whole service).
