Re: A java DEBUG flag

[Cedric Berger]

"Boehm, Hans" wrote:
> 
> > This is in the SUN Assertion JSR.
> > http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr/asrt_prop.html
> >
> > ... The documentation is public but we certainly can not
> > participate in its
> > development because of SUNs *stupid* IP restrictions in the
> > JCP.  There are good
> > ideas here though and since this stuff will eventually make
> > it into JDK 1.4 I
> > would say it should eventually belong here.
> >
> True.  But isn't this an awfully weak proposal?  It doesn't seem to allow me
> to cleanly compute additional state that's used only in assertion checking.
> I find that I need to do that all the time in order to be able to write
> reasonable assertions.  For example, I might explicitly keep track of who
> holds a particular lock, so that I can assert that I hold it at some point.
> Or I might need to count opened files so that I can assert that I closed
> everything I opened in a certain section of code.  Or ...
> 
> Hans

Can't you put all this stuff a special debug class to keep things clean?
This class will only gets loaded if assertions are enabled!

class Debugging {
    static int openFilesCount;
    static boolean openFile() {
        return openFilesCount < LIMIT;
    }
    static boolean closeFile() {
        return openFilesCount > 0;
    }
}
class Main {
    void doSomething() {
        assert(Debugging.openFile());       
        // do something
        assert(Debugging.closeFile());
    }
}

Cedric