Basic doubt in Assertion

[Aarav Thomas]

I have read the following lines in one book, regarding Assertion:
"AssertionError is a subclass of Throwable, so it can be caught. But just
don�t do it! If you�re going to try to recover from something, it should be an exception.
******************************
To discourage you from trying to substitute an assertion for an exception, the AssertionError doesn�t provide access to the object that generated it. All you get is the String message.
******************************* "

I am not able to understand the lines embedded in stars(*). Some one please explain this...???

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

James,
Welcome to JavaRanch!

As stated in the first section, it is bad practice to catch Errors (rather than Exceptions.) However it is possible and the authors of Java recognize that people will do something just because they can even if it is recommended against. So they tried to make catching an AssertionError to be as useless as possible. Not giving you access to the object that caused the AssertionError to be thrown makes it harder to use. Often you want to be able to do something with a caught Exception.

[Aarav Thomas]

Thanka a lot for the reply...
Sorry for not putting my doubt very clearly. The statement says, we do not have access to AssertionError object. See program below:

public class test
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
try{
int i = 10;
assert (i > 10);
}catch(AssertionError ae){
ae.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
Here i'm able to use the Assertion Error object (i.e. i have access to the object). This is all we can do even with Exception object. So, what exactly those lines mean...???