John Regehr on "Use of Assertions"

[Walter Bright]

On 9/2/2018 2:12 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> On 09/01/2018 04:15 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1091
>>
> 
> This does make me think of one thing: Shouldn't assert expressions be required 
> to be pure? (even if only weakly pure)
> 
> Not sure how much practical problems that would create, but at least in theory 
> it certainly sounds like the right thing.

It's come up before. The trouble comes when the code doing the evaluation has 
side effects which are benign to the function being compiled, and these can be 
useful. For example, it could read a mutable global variable.