I wish Assert would be inlined properly - that would be so useful.

I wish Assert would be inlined properly -  that would be so useful.

Example:

program Project1;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  SysUtils;

procedure EnsureAssigned(obj: TObject; const name: string); inline;
begin
  Assert(Assigned(obj), 'Parameter "' + name + ' was nil');
end;

var
  i: Integer;
  o: TObject;
begin
//  Assert(Assigned(o));
//  Assert(Assigned(o), 'Parameter "o" was nil');
  EnsureAssigned(o, 'o');
end.

Let's assume I want to do some parameter validation using Assert (because I can turn that off for release builds by compiler switch). But there is only a boolean and an optional message I can pass. That requires putting the actual check (in this case Assigned but you can think of any other condition as well) and an optional message there to get a better error message than just "Assertion failure (, line )". If I run the code with the first two Asserts I get the correct line of code and unit. However when I use the EnsureAssigned procedure even though the code gets inlined it uses the line the Assert is in (and the unit if I had it in another one).

This is one of the reasons some while ago in the Spring4D we thought it is good to have the Guard type to write more expressive pre and post condition code. But that causes the problem of not being able to easily turn such code off for release builds for example. Now if I could use Assert within inlined routines and it uses the correct line number and unit name that would be one step of improvement.

What would be even better though would be if we had magic functions to return the line number and unit name (I know FPC can do that since ages and actually the logic for that is inside the Delphi compiler because it uses it for Assert!) However these also should be properly return the value they are inlined to, otherwise I cannot use them in subroutines properly.

Allen Bauer Marco Cantù  FYI