Is Java assert broken?

Question

While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn\'t already know! A more

Answer 1

I think its the way assert usage is interpreted and envisioned.

If you really want to add the check in your actual production code, why not use If directly or any other conditional statement?

Those being already present in language, the idea of assert was only to have developer's add assertions only if they don't really expect this condition to ever happen.

E.g checking an object to be null, let's say a developer wrote a private method and called it from two places (this is not ideal example but may works for private methods) in the class where he knows he passes a not null object, instead of adding unnecessary check of if since as of today you know there is no way object would be null But if someone tomorrow calls this method with null argument, in developer's unit testing this can be caught due to presence of assertion and in final code you still don't need an if check.