Assertions in programming

Introduction

Managing your software is always more important than developing it. This requires following thousands of coding standards and handling hundreds of vulnerabilities and edge cases. One of the features of programming languages that helps you in your software development lifecycle is assertions. Assertions are logical functions to check whether particular requirement is met before code runs further. If that condition is not met, the program terminates and gives assertion error and doesn’t run further lines of code.

Let’s dive more into it

You wrote a code and assign a variable, let’s say x as 5. After few lines of random coding, if value of x somehow changes due to some wrong mathematical calculations, this can create problems further.

Suppose you have some potentially dangerous code starting from next line and if that code gets a value of x other than 5, your application will eventually get destroyed. To tackle this, just check if x actually contains 5 before moving on to that dangerous code.

Assertions are this much easy

Use following syntax in C++ to check above logic — assert(x==5);

If above function is correct, code goes further pretty fine, else it stops right here and throws assertion error.

Why don’t use Exception handling instead of assertions

Exception handling is not preferred for checking logical correctness of statements. For instance, while receiving data from an API in your software, you can apply exception handling to try something if data is received, except do other thing, while assertion would check if some object contains the value, that further code asks for.