On Mar 17, 2006, at 3:57 AM, nicolas cellier wrote:

> However Markus, defensive programming is just a style, not a bad  
> style, but
> not the only one and not the most adequate in every case. There are  
> many
> cases where optimistic programming is better, when failure cases  
> are so
> unprobable that it would be a waste of time to repeatidly test costly
> assertions (also better regarding volume of code). Exceptions find  
> their
> place here.

If you prefer corrupted data in your database over a a slower or  
error throwing program (*) you could always switch off the assertions  
in your production system later without any loss of performance:
http://www.whysmalltalk.com/articles/bykov/HitchHiker.htm

Implemented/ported by Romain Robbes:
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2004-March/ 
075327.html

Cheers,

Markus

(*) You might be in a project phase, where your project leader  
politically prefers bad data in the db than walkback screens in the  
face of the end users.
At least I experienced such kind of a project once... ;-)