Question

Is there a setting (I’d expect it to be an environment variable) in Mathematica that would make the kernel quit at the occurrence of a debug error? Often, I’ll get debug errors and the notebook will continue evaluating bad data forcing me to restart the kernel.

Answer 1

You wrote:

Primarily, I’d like my notebook to stop running upon an Assertion
error.

You can do this by defining $AssertFunction as follows:

$AssertFunction := Quit[] & ;

Now the kernel quits when an assertion fails:

<< ExampleData`FunctionWithAssert` 
Compute[ 1.0]

(*=> kernel quits*)

Alternatively, you can use Interrupt in the same way:

$AssertFunction := Interrupt[] & ;

It allows you to abort the evaluation or enter subsession (the same as Dialog[] does in Arnoud’s answer).

You also can extend this approach for printing the assertion which failed:

$AssertFunction := (Print[HoldForm @@ #]; Interrupt[]) &;