What's the point of NSAssert, actually?

Question

I have to ask this, because: The only thing I recognize is, that if the assertion fails, the app crashes. Is that the reason why to use NSAssert? Or what else is the benefit

Answer 1

To fully answer his question, the point of any type of assert is to aid debugging. It is more valuable to catch errors at their source, then to catch them in the debugger when they cause crashes.

For example, you may pass a value to a function expects values in a certain range. The function may store the value for later use, and on later use the application crashes. The call stack seen in this scenario would not show the source of the bad value. It's better to catch the bad value as it comes in to find out who's passing the bad value and why.