assertions

Surprisingly I was only able to find one previous question on SO about this subject, and I'd just like to get the community "Vote of Confidence" (or not!) on my approach. The way I see it is thus: use Debug.Assert to state things you EXPECT would be true. This would be used when we are in complete control over our environment, for example in a method to verify some pre and post-conditions. use Exceptions when exceptional circumstances arise. Dealing with external resources, i.e. files, databases, networks etc is a no-brainer. But... It gets a little murky in the following scenario. Please note

I've read plenty of articles (and a couple of other similar questions that were posted on StackOverflow) about how and when to use assertions, and I understood them well. But still, I don't understand what kind of motivation should drive me to use Debug.Assert instead of throwing a plain exception. What I mean is, in .NET the default response to a failed assertion is to "stop the world" and display a message box to the user. Though this kind of behavior could be modified, I find it highly annoying and redundant to do that, while I could instead, just throw a suitable exception. This way, I

I'm writing per the following, in which I try to produce a decent error message when comparing two multiline blocks of Unicode text. The interior method that does the comparison raises an assertion, but the default explanation is useless to me I need to add something to code such as this below: def assert_long_strings_equal(one, other): lines_one = one.splitlines() lines_other = other.splitlines() for line1, line2 in zip(lines_one, lines_other): try: my_assert_equal(line1, line2) except AssertionError, error: # Add some information to the printed result of error??! raise I cannot figure out

I wanna do something like java -enableassertions com.geeksanonymous.TestClass How do I do this? The easiest way is to use the Run properties. The property is labeled 'VM Options'. This tutorial has more detailed info and screen shots from NetBeans 5.5. The dialog is very similar in the most recent release of NetBeans; 6.8, which is available today. With a Maven project in netbeans 7.0, choose "File" -> "Project Properties ()". In the window that appears, choose "Run", and add -enableassertions to the "VM Options" textbox. I dont know about Netbeans, but you also can programmatically enable

Let's say we are testing the result of a method by asserting the equality of all the properties of the result object with properties of an expected result object. Should we implement equals method and use Assert.AreEqual(expectedResult, actualResult)... But equals may mean something different in production code. Which is the best practice? Asserting the equality of the objects through overriden equals method or Asserting the equality of all the properties I for one use custom assertions. There are two main reasons: don't force test concerns into production. This means that the meaning of

Sometimes a local variable is used for the sole purpose of checking it in an assert(), like so - int Result = Func(); assert( Result == 1 ); When compiling code in a Release build, assert()s are usually disabled, so this code may produce a warning about Result being set but never read. A possible workaround is - int Result = Func(); if ( Result == 1 ) { assert( 0 ); } But it requires too much typing, isn't easy on the eyes and causes the condition to be always checked (yes, the compiler may optimize the check away, but still). I'm looking for an alternative way to express this assert() in a