On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Indeed. In C, assert() will abort the program if it is enabled, which
is hard to miss. It is not comparable to the PHP assert() function.

...except PHP's assert() *also* aborts the program if enabled. What am I missing here?

The reasons I don't like assert() are:

1. It doesn't throw an exception
2. It acts like eval()

We could have a library of PHPUnit-style assertion functions which
throw exceptions and don't act like eval(), I would be fine with that.
Maybe MWAssert::greaterThan( $foo, $bar ) or something.

1. It's fairly trivial to use assert_options() to make assertions throw exceptions if you really wanted to while developing.

2. Except it's not. Again, you're welcome to give an example where code provided as a string in an assertion is not exactly the same as having the code hardcoded.

Tyler Romeo

Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016

Major in Computer Science