thanks for the clarification
after re-reading JLS amendment on assertion, i found the following paragraph worth noting,
Why is AssertionError a subclass of Error rather than RuntimeException?
This issue was controversial. The expert group discussed it at at length and came to the conclusion that Error was more appropriate, to discourage programmers from attempting to recover from assertion failures. It is, in general, difficult or impossible to localize the source of an assertion failure. Such a failure indicates that the program is operating "outside of known space," and attempts to continue execution are likely to be harmful. Further, convention dictates that methods specify most runtime exceptions they may throw (via "@throws" tags). It makes little sense to include in a method's specification the circumstances under which it may generate an assertion failure. This information may be regarded as an implementation detail, which can change from implementation to implementation and release to release.
that also explains that we are not encouraged to further process any assertion
[ January 19, 2003: Message edited by: Aaron Anders ]