assert(condition[, message]) patch

[BCS]

Derek Parnell wrote:
> On Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:38:50 +1000, Sean Kelly <sean at f4.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Some applications ship with asserts left on, and the more information  
>> the user has about why the application just halted the better.  As  
>> others have noted, an optional message also allows state information 
>> to  be conveyed, which can be useful in the absence of a core dump.
> 
> And this is a deployment/development strategy that is flawed. It would 
> be  better to ship a product without asserts turned on, but if you have 
> to  show internal issues to a customer then don't use asserts - use 
> exceptions  or similar to do this at run time. Just use asserts for 
> quality assurance  prior to shipping.
> 
> For me, the golden rule with D is don't use asserts to report errors in  
> production releases.
> 


An assert is just syntactic sugar for something like:

if(!(cond)) throw new AssertError(__FILE__":"~itoa!(__LINE__)~" Assert 
ERROR")

so they are exceptions.

As to not reporting asserts to the user, how about making asserts go to 
a special Stream object that can be redirected to a file or something 
(if it goes to stderr we're most of the way there). That with a 
backtrace log could make for a vary powerful bug hunting tool.