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

Assertions are really a great and concise documentation tool for a code maintainer.

For example I can write:

foo should be non-null and greater than 0

or put this into the body of the program:

assert foo != null;
assert foo.value > 0;

They are extremely valuable for documenting private/package private methods to express original programmer invariants.

For the added bonus, when the subsystem starts to behave flaky, you can turn asserts on and add extra validation instantly.