Why should I use asserts?

Question

I never got the idea of asserts -- why should you ever use them?

I mean, let\'s say I were a formula driver and all the asserts were things like security belt, helm

Answer 1

From your post, it sounds like you are not disagreeing with the idea of using assertions, but rather the idea of having assertions in debug and not having them active in production.

The reason for this is that when debugging, you might want the process to fail catastrophically -- i.e. throw an exception and quit, so that the error can be addressed. In production, this could affect your entire system, and the error condition could occur only for a very few cases. So, in production you would probably want to log the error, but keep the process running.

Using assertions lets you change the behavior between debug and release.

I agree with you that the assertions should not just be silenced in production code -- many errors are not exposed in test environments and it is important to know when assertions fail in production.