Do you use assertions? [closed]

Answer 1

If you like asserts, you'll LOVE contracts. They are basically the idea of asserts extended to more situations.

Answer 2

I tend not to use them, although I'm not sure why either.

If you do unit testing, such as with nUnit, you would obviously use them all the time to verify your test results.

Answer 3

No. But can't wait. I used to unit test everything with junit, but that was school, small projects no pressure. i'm in real life now, i supposed to finish this code yesterday....

Answer 4

I use them all the time. They're a nice way to practice the "Crash early" philosophy, better to have to solve why an assertion failed than to have to deal with bad/corrupted output.

The issue is you have to kind of make it a habit. I rarely see any middle ground in it, people are either not used to it and almost never use them or people use them and they're littered rigorously throughout the code. You just have to get into the mindset of noticing "Oh hey, I'm implicity assuming something here, let me explicitly confirm it 'assert(ASSUMPTION)'"

Answer 5

The Java assert keyword is pretty half assed (need to run the program with the -ea commandline option) so I find myself relying on exceptions instead of asserts.

Answer 6

I never used to use them, but I had an awful time debugging my last program, and at one point was logging when variables were null or didn't contain the values that I would expect. Once I'd got it all working I asserted everything that my program needed in order to run successfully.