JSR 41 has added a simple assertion facility to Java. In the proposed final draft, assert statements have one of two forms:

assert Expr_1;
assert Expr_1:Expr_2;

Both of these forms, with and without parentheses around Expr_1 and Expr_2, are recognized by javac when the "-source 1.4" flag is used. However, javadoc (Standard Doclet version 1.4 beta (04 Aug 2001)) only recognizes

assert(Expr)
and
assert (Expr)

independent of whether or not the "-source 1.4" flag is used. In particular, the program

/**
 * JavaDoc for AssertTest2
 */

public class AssertTest2 {

    public static void main(String argv[]) {
assert true;
assert true:true;
assert(true):true;
assert (true):true;
assert true:(true);
assert(true):(true);
assert (true):(true);
    }
}

compiles with javac -source 1.4 but javadoc generates an error for each line of input. By commenting out all preceeding assert lines, I verified each line is rejected by itself; i.e. the 2nd and subsequent assert statements are *not* rejected because of poor "error" recovery in javadoc for the first "mistaken" line, "assert true".

Moreover, javadoc accepts the previous two-arg assert construction

assert(Expr_1, Expr_2); // no longer valid

Concretely,

/**
 * JavaDoc for AssertTest3
 */

public class AssertTest3 {

    public static void main(String argv[]) {
assert(true, true);
assert (true, true);
    }

}

Is parsed by javadoc but rejected by javac. This should be fixed.