The current wording "This module is used for writing unit tests for your applications, you can access it with require('assert')." implies that this module should only be used in development while unit testing.

The article "Error Handling in Node.js" by Joyent (https://www.joyent.com/developers/node/design/errors) uses the assert module in an efficient way to validate required function arguments.

Reviewed-By: James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com>
PR-URL: https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/25786

The message argument is optional for both assert() and
assert.ok(). This commit makes message optional for assert().

PR-URL: https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/9003
Reviewed-By: Colin Ihrig <cjihrig@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Trevor Norris <trev.norris@gmail.com>

The parameter parser specifically looked for the old bracket syntax.
This generated a lot of warnings when building the docs. Those warnings
have been fixed by changing the parsing logic.

Signed-off-by: Trevor Norris <trev.norris@gmail.com>

Documentation incorrectly used bracket notation for optional parameters.
This caused inconsistencies in usage because of examples like the
following:

    fs.write(fd, data[, position[, encoding]], callback)

This simply fixes all uses of bracket notation in documentation.

Signed-off-by: Trevor Norris <trev.norris@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Fedor Indutny <fedor@indutny.com>

Update assert.throws() and assert.doesNotThrow() docs

It takes an optional "expected exception" argument that is not used meaningfully
but is nevertheless documented. Undocument it, it confuses casual readers of the
documentation.

Fixes #3935.