[plt-scheme] contracts.ss: Can you disable them at runtime?

From: Grant Rettke (grettke at acm.org)
Date: Thu May 17 15:20:56 EDT 2007

On 5/17/07, Anton van Straaten <anton at appsolutions.com> wrote:
> Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> > Long:  Tony Hoare once said that assertions are like life vests. Why
> > use them on land during practice and leave them back when you go to sea?

Usually the biggest reason for folks to disable assertions is to
increase execution speed and to prevent the system from
catastrophically failing. The vision is that you test until you think
that everything "pretty much works right", and then you disable the
assertions.

Whether we can say that 3ghz quad-core Xeons are not fast enough or
that it is better to have a system continue to run with unexpected
behavior than to just crash is something for another thread :)


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