It really depends on the kind of feedback you want to receive from doctorest

using assert in your test is a more compact approach. It works by ensuring that if the condition fails, Python raises an assertionerror. On the other hand, encoding your condition as a logical operator returning true or false will result in lines like true/ false in the output which might be less informative when the condition fails.

There’s no major reason not to use ASSERT as long as youre comfortable with the exception based error reporting and want a more compact test.