Mark,

Everyone is right here. Anything that ASSERT is cofirming should be handled also by an error handler, however ASSERT and error hanlding are two different things. ASSERT is designed to bring up a dialog where the developer can switch to debug mode to find out why there is a problem while error handling needs to either fix the problem or shut down the app.

It may seem like double work, but for frameworks (for one example) it is very nice to give the developer a message saying a certain parameter should be character. The developer can then go to the debugger and change the parm's value and finish the testing run without exiting and recoding and rerunning the app.