Seems likes it might be useful to have the assert display a message when an assertion fails.
Currently an AssertionError
gets thrown, can you specify a custom message for it?
Can you show an example mechanism for doing this (other than creating your own exception type and throwing it)?
You certainly can:
assert x > 0 : "x must be greater than zero, but x = " + x;
See Programming with Assertions for more information.