Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)

[Dale Stanbrough <dale@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>]

Darin Johnson,  writes:

"How about "Assert"!!!  That's exactly what this means in English,
 despite the fact that Ada changed its meaning.  "Assert" and
 "assertion" in English in no way mean "check that this is true".
 
--
But this doesn't mean that assertions can't be checked. For example
I checked the assertions you made below, and I don't believe them :-).


"Instead, "pragma Assert(x)", or "#pragma assert(x)" should mean that x
 is assumed to be true; which implementation-wise may involve compiler
 optimizations that break things if the assertion is false (what
 exactly happens might be changed via compiler options, such the
 debugging does different stuff than production code)."

--
If all compilers assumed that asserts were true, then they would
produce _no_ executable code to check the assertion, and would spend
their time making the optimazations you suggest. How many do that?
I suspect accepted industry practice _is_ to check assertions and
to take appropriate action.


"At least in C, an implementation can define "#pragma assert" to do
 something much different than the assert macro; even though it is
 confusing."

I'm sorry, but I don't follow this.


Dale