On 2019-10-30 2:05 am, Rutger Hofman wrote:
Sincere request: can this assert please be removed? Its validity
appears
debatable, and it is a showstopper for me!
If we agree that an empty interval does not have a well-defined
center, then the assertion is quite valid.
But the problematic intervals in question were never intended to ever
be empty, yet their left and right bounds are computed in such a way
to form degenerate, "inside-out" intervals that are treated as empty.
The assertion properly is pointing out this flaw in computation. As
such, we should not be removing the assertion, because rather we
should ensure that computations never invert the bounds of an
interval.
That said, I feel the hard-fail approach of an assertion is too
strong, and what we need is to simply emit a warning that the function
will be returning the midpoint of the interval's bounds despite the
interval appearing to be invalid (read: empty).