note 71942 rejected from function.assert by danbrown

Note Submitter: tom russo at gmail dot com ---- hodgman at ali dot com dot au said: "Assertions should only be enabled during testing/development, and then disabled once your code reaches a production stage." Assertions should _not_ be turned off in production code. Although it's common to do so, turning off assertions in production is a bad practice. If your production code fails an assert, YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT. Asserts are a debugging tool, but you should not stop debugging your code just because it has gone into production. Many people claim that removing asserts gives a performance benefit. In modern programming languages this simply isn't true. If you were doing an assert on something that is extremely slow/expensive to compute, you might consider turning that assert off. But in practice this really isn't how asserts are used. There's a good discussion of this issue in the book The Pragmatic Programmer.