My motivation to propose this is that I spend a lot of time debugging
issues on production builds (multiple projects) where some of the
parameters were checked by using assert only.
Thank you,
Gabi


On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 6:10 PM Oleksandr Koval <
oleksandr.koval.dev_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> assert has a single purpose - perform check in debug mode and terminate if
> it fails. Such checks are usually used to validate preconditions which can
> break function execution or are too expensive to perform them in release
> mode.
> In your example you are trying to use assert to check precondition but
> it's actually not a precondition because your function can continue
> execution and do something valid (return 0 in your case). To fix your
> design either make it a real precondition:
> int f(int* p){
> assert(p);
> return *p;
> }
>
> or make nullptr a valid input for your function:
> int f(int* p){
> if(!p){
> return 0;
> }
> return *p;
> }
>
> What you propose is a weird mix of both, a thing which terminates in Debug
> but returns something in Release, this is not how good interfaces are made.
>
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 5:52 PM Florian Gavril via Std-Proposals <
> std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> As everyone knows that, the assert macro is very useful to find out
>> unexpected conditions on the development stage, but for the production
>> builds, the NDEBUG is usually enabled and assert is actually disabled. If
>> assert is used, for example, in a function, to check if one of the
>> parameters is not NULL, the program execution is terminated and some
>> messages are displayed. But if NDEBUG is defined, the program will silently
>> continue until the disaster happens. In order to avoid this situation, the
>> programmer adds a double check for that parameter with a retur routine.
>>
>> Basic example:
>> int func(int *p) {
>>
>>
>>
>> * assert(p); if (p == NULL) { return 0; }*
>> ..........
>> return 1;
>> }
>>
>> My proposal is to re-define assert or define a new macro (let's say
>> assertr, pretty much like assertm) which will take two arguments: condition
>> and the return value for non-debug builds, In this case, the previous code
>> may be compacted:
>> int func(int *p) {
>> *assertr(p, 0);*
>> ..........
>> return 1;
>> }
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Gabi Florian
>>
>> --
>> Std-Proposals mailing list
>> Std-Proposals_at_[hidden]
>> https://lists.isocpp.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/std-proposals
>>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Oleksandr Koval.
>