Should a warning or perhaps even an assertion failure be produced if delete is used to free memory obtained using malloc()?

No, but it does necessarily result in undefined behavior, which means that anything can happen, including the program blowing up or the program continuing to run in what appears to be a correct manner.

Delete has a special property that free() does not: it calls destructors, which in turn may call more deletes as that object may have allocated other things on the heap.

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