By popular demand, asserts have been removed. Now there should not be any issues building from CVS.
I have a question concerning asserts. It’s not offensive, only an “information request”.
I know the concept very well but I have never found a reason to use them, since I think that if I can write a condition that should not fail, I can write the error handling, too.
Are there any aspects of asserts I have overlooked? What are they really useful for?
As far as C++ was concerned (never used assert in java) is that you could put millions of assert checks in your code in C++ to make sure everythign went smoothly. Now of course millions of redundant checks would make running the program slower. The advantage of assert was that with a simple switch you could choose not to compile them. So when you "test" your product all the error checking would be there, but once you release it the error checking is gone and the speed goes up.
Yep and that is the same benefit it provides in Java
I was porting parts of stripifier code from C++ and I have left all asserts in place - it was a safety in case I would make some stupid mistake. As long as you do not modify code in question (and I really doubt anybody will try to modify a stripifier core), there are not longer needed.