In general I would agree with you—it sucks to override a standard function with weird, local, non-standard functionality. However, in this case, it's an extrem

In general I would agree with you—it sucks to override a standard function with weird, local, non-standard functionality. However, in this case, it's an extremely common practice to override assert() so that it only aborts or warns during testing or when some DEBUG macro is defined. To attack that is to ignore long-standing, wide-spread idioms.