Re: Assertions in principle
* Roland Pibinger:
On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 09:31:56 +0100, "Alf P. Steinbach" wrote:
The commercial version of MSVC is one commercial compiler (in the price
range you mention, the 7.1 version with documentation was about 13.000
NKr) that ships with asserts enabled -- it ICEs regularly.
But ICE doesn't mean that all asserts are turned on in production
code.
Right, it doesn't mean that the moon is gouda-cheese, but so what?
An ICE (Internal Compiler Error) is an assert.
For optimization some small parts of the code will instead (typically)
be very intensively tested. However, that is impractical for the
complete application. The asserts that are left on also serve to
hopefully catch invalid state caused by any remaining errors in the
intensively tested code.
For that matter, even Windows Explorer, the Windows GUI, ships with
asserts, or an equivalent mechanism, enabled, doing a report-and-restart
when it crashes.
When it crashes! Again, that doesn't mean at all that asserts are
turned on in production code. Quite the contrary! Probably a signal
handler for SIGSEV is invoked.
Probably not, unless you're talking of a *nix version of Windows Explorer.
BTW, people interested in Microsoft's
usage of assert should read Steve Maguire's classic book 'Writing
Solid Code':
www.amazon.com/Writing-Solid-Code-Microsofts-Programming/dp/1556155514
For an honest and competent developer it's lunacy to turn off asserts.
LoL!
Hm.
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