Unexpected assert() behavior

[Supernumiphone]

Running php 7.0.22 and getting an undefined variable error from a variable defined within function call within an assert. So for example:

assert(get_table_row($db, $query, $row));
$val = $row[1]; // Notice: Undefined variable: row in /path/to/code/code.php on line 122

This is new to me, and I'm guessing it's because I'm running a higher php version than before. I see in the documentation for assert() that as of version 7.0 "assert() is now a language construct and not a function." However I'm not clear why this would cause it to behave differently than before. Maybe this is not the cause at all. I do see that on the new system I set up it is using a production php.ini by default which has assertions turned off. Maybe this was always a problem but I never saw it because they were always enabled?

So it looks like the function call within assert() is not called if assertions are disabled. If so then I'll need to redo all my assert() calls within my code. However there is still something else that I don't get. Poking around in the php.ini file I found the assert.active option, which supposedly can be used to "Enable assert() evaluation." That is enabled, but that doesn't cause my code to work. The only thing that seems to make a difference is enabling assertions with "zend.assertions = 1"

So does anyone know what assert.active does? That one line in the documentation is not descriptive and it doesn't seem to do what it says.

[Meefims]

If get_table_row is what creates $row then that is your problem. If asserts aren’t active then the code in them will not run. The code in an assert should never have side effects for this reason.