I support the idea behind improving assert; I really should be able to say
'disable assertions' somehow and then assertions would have no impact at
runtime. I have not reviewed the changes for the revised RFC at this time,
but I wanted to voice my support for the general idea.
Also:
> assert never was a good thing to use
This is just nonsense. Properly used asserts are fundamental in defensive
programming and you can quite a bit of literature about it. Perhaps Pierre
meant to say, "assert never was a good thing to use *in PHP*" and then I
would agree with him because of the currently poor implementation, not
because they are bad in principle.