gainst some, but not all abuse is an invitation to disaster.
    Clients will begin to rely on the protection and their expectations will
    grow to cover unprotected parts of the interface.</p>

    <p><b>Note for Windows developers</b>: unfortunately, the native
    exception-handling used by most Windows compilers actually throws an
    exception when you use <tt>assert()</tt>. Actually, this is true of other
    programmer errors such as segmentation faults and divide-by-zero errors.
    One problem wi