Assertion and checking functions

I'll just leave this here for potential future consideration as it came up on gitter's typing-dev channel. Typescript has something called assertion functions, which enables the type checker to understand that a function does not return if a certain condition is false. I think something similar, but more generalized, would be interesting, especially for unit test functions like assert_is_instance(), assert_true() etc.

def assert_positive(x: object) -> AssertsInstance["x", int]:
    assert isinstance(x, int) and x > 0

Related, checking functions could work like this:

def is_positive(x: object) -> ChecksInstance["x", int]:
    return isinstance(x, int) and x > 0

def my_func(x: Union[int, str]) -> None:
    if is_positive(x):
        # x must be an int
        ...
    else:
        # x can be an int or str
        ...

Start with the linked TypeScript 3.7 assertion-functions documentation and the issue's assert_positive and is_positive examples. Since no repository files or tests are named, first define how generalized assertion and checking annotations should express type narrowing, then document the agreed behavior and required test coverage.