Answer by Jason Baker for Best practice for using assert?

The only thing that's really wrong with this approach is that it's hard to make a very descriptive exception using assert statements. If you're looking for the simpler syntax, remember you can also do something like this:

class XLessThanZeroException(Exception):    passdef CheckX(x):    if x < 0:        raise XLessThanZeroException()def foo(x):    CheckX(x)    #do stuff here

Another problem is that using assert for normal condition-checking is that it makes it difficult to disable the debugging asserts using the -O flag.