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

I use it mostly for tests during development. For instance, here is the smoke test of my utf-8 library Whenever I make a change in the library code I run the tests and if a bug is introduced an assert will trigger. Of course, I could have used a full-blown unit test framework, but for my purposes asserts are just fine.