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From: djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
Subject: Re: next "big" language?? (disagree)
Date: 1996/06/25
Message-ID: <qqn31rr53g.fsf@tartarus.ucsd.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 162142420
sender: djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu
references: <dewar.835121649@schonberg> <dewar.835306677@schonberg>
organization: UCSD Computer Science and Engineering Department
newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.pascal,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.misc,comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-06-25T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


>  >Obviously if there are two concepts, then we should have two names. For
>  >example (in Ada) we could stick with
>  >
>  >	pragma Assert(x);
>  >
>  >for the traditional "please check this really is the case" assertion
>  >and introduce
>  >
>  >	pragma Fact(x);
>  >
>  >(or some other name) for the "this really is true, trust me, and make
>  >appropriate optimisations" type assertion. Can anyone think of a better
>  >name (pragma Declare(x) is not available in Ada) than "Fact"?

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".

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).

At least in C, an implementation can define "#pragma assert" to do
something much different than the assert macro; even though it is
confusing.
-- 
Darin Johnson
djohnson@ucsd.edu	O-
  - Luxury!  In MY day, we had to make do with 5 bytes of swap...