Improving reliability with assertions
Assertions, which you’ve seen used in earlier examples in this book, were added to the JDK 1.4 version of Java in order to aid programmers in improving the reliability of their programs. Properly used, assertions can add to program robustness by verifying that certain conditions are satisfied during the execution of your program. For example, suppose you have a numerical field in an object that represents the month on the Julian calendar. You know that this value must always be in the range 1-12, and an assertion can be used to check this and report an error if it somehow falls outside of that range. If you’re inside a method, you can check the validity of an argument with an assertion. These are important tests to make sure that your program is correct, but they cannot be performed by compile-time checking, and they do not fall into the purview of unit testing. In this section, we’ll look at the mechanics of the assertion mechanism, and the way that you can use assertions to partially implement the design by contract concept.
