John Regehr on "Use of Assertions"

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Sunday, 9 September 2018 at 21:20:11 UTC, John Carter wrote:
> ie. Yes, everybody knows the words, everybody can read the 
> code, everybody can find somebody who agrees with his intent 
> and meaning.... but get a large enough group together to try 
> agree on what actions, for example, the optimiser should take 
> that are implied by that meaning... and flames erupt.

Well, it has less to do with "assert" than with how semantics are 
assigned to something that should never occur. But it isn't 
really optimal to hardcode failure semantics in the source code...

Even simple semantics, like whether tests should be emitted in 
release builds is possibly context dependent, so not really 
possible to determine with any level of certainty when writing a 
library reused across many projects.