DE wrote:
there were a discussion recentrly about verifying arguments of assertion macros while checks are turned off
I guess this would be closer to what you want: // ------------------------------------------ #include <cassert> #ifdef NDEBUG #ifdef assert #undef assert static bool assert_helper(const bool&) { return true; } #define assert(cond) if (sizeof(assert_helper(cond))) {} #endif #endif // ------------------------------------------ The following compiles without warning, regardless of NDEBUG being defined or not (I used g++ test.cpp -Wall -Wextra -O3): // -------------------- int main() { int i = 0; assert(i); } // -------------------- And the next snippet always fails, regardless of NDEBUG being defined or not, because an instance of A cannot be interpreted as bool. // -------------------- class A {}; int main() { assert(A()); } // --------------------- And finally, the next snippet demonstrates that it is still safely optimized away in case of NDEBUG being defined. // -------------------- #include <iostream> int test() { std::cerr << "NDEBUG is OFF" << std::endl; return 0; } class A {}; int main() { assert(test()); } // --------------------- Regards, Roland