As they used to say on slashdot:
From the "C++ design committee was so preoccupied with whether they could, they never stopped to think whether they should" department.
Asserts:
1. You don't like the being conditional on NDEBUG ot aborting the program - roll out your own. Will still be a one-liner.
2. You want them act as documentation of pre-conditions in headers - just add a comment there.
The only somewhat reasonable development here are the post conditions for functions with multiple returns, but post/s are dramatically less common than pre/s, so their utility is also debatable.
No worries, this will probably land in C as well, static_assert was already.
I have seen far too many times when the comment in the implementaiton doesn't match reality to accept pre/post conditions in a comment. I want my contracts someplace where they get evaluated from time to time so that they are fixed when they are wrong.