Expected behavior with -esa

[Brandon Passanisi]

I'm currently looking at a bug report: 
http://monaco.sfbay.sun.com/detail.jsf?cr=5066854 which describes an 
issue where a simple program was run with the option -esa to enable 
system assertions.  The bug author describes that, in the provided 
sample code, an AssertionError occurs when the spec says a 
MissingFormatArgumentException should be thrown.  When running the 
sample program without the -esa option, a MissingFormatArgumentException 
is thrown.  It seems to me that it shouldn't be unexpected to see an 
AssertionError when -esa is used, instead of the 
MissingFormatArgumentException.  In fact, this behavior appears to not 
be limited to this particular test case, and can possibly occur with 
other APIs if an AssertionError is seen before an expected exception.  I 
was hoping to see some sort of explanation in the evaluation or comments 
section of the bug report, but the bug report was only updated with 
references about how the bug was filed too late for a release.  Can 
someone clarify if this behavior with -esa is actually a bug?

Thanks.