Temporary suspension of disbelief (invariant)

[Walter Bright]

Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> In the general case, it would overly complicate things to try and make an 
> invariant not really be an invariant. If you really wanted to do that, you could 
> use class variables which kept the state and made it so that the asserts in the 
> invariant weren't run after a particular function call until another particular 
> function call were made. But that strikes me as a colossally bad idea. Still, if 
> you wanted such functionality, you _can_ get it, so I see no reason to 
> complicate invariants just to make it easier to write what is likely bad code 
> (or at least which is at a higher risk of being bad code).

Exactly. Having a class invariant that cheats is like painting over rust. It 
might look new, but the rust will shortly break through.