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Design by Contract in C++?
An anonymous reader asks: "I have read some of the stuff on Eiffel, watched their tutorial videos about design by contract, and the entire thing sounds like a pretty good idea. However, the problem is that we don't use Eiffel at work, and I highly doubt I could get people to come around to the idea of switching to it. Although we use a lot of C++, I can imagine that a lot of the ideas from Eiffel can be applied there. I have looked around on the net and found a few articles talking about different ways of applying design by contract using assert statements and the like. I also found the dlib C++ library on SourceForge which, among other things, puts a design by contract face on a lot of API calls. So, there are obviously people doing it. What is everyone's experience with Design by Contract in C++? What tools are there that help make it a workable system? Lastly, are there any pitfalls to taking this approach in C++?"
> -----Original Message-----
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> From: James Heliotis [mailto:jeh@...]
>
> I have a student who is interested in doing a project adding
> design-by-contract assertions to another language. To my memory,
> I have never seen anything about how assertions are implemented in
> EiffelStudio, and what the challenges and pitfalls were. Can anyone
> point me to any documentation?
>
> Thanks a lot,
> James
Dear Jim:
Your student should find the following links useful:
http://www.phact.org/e/dennis4.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CircleSquaring.html
http://chemistry.about.com/cs/generalchemistry/a/
Hope this helps,
-- Bertrand Meyer
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/eiffel_softwar