Programming by Contract

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Tue Aug 11 15:30:00 EDT 2009


Ethan Furman wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> I have seen posts about the assert statement and PbC (or maybe it was 
> DbC), and I just took a very brief look at pycontract 
> (http://www.wayforward.net/pycontract/) and now I have at least one 
> question:  Is this basically another way of thinking about unit testing, 
> or is the idea of PbC more along the lines of *always* checking the 
> input/output of functions to ensure they are correct?  (*Contstant 
> vigilance!* as Prof Moody would say ;)
> 
> I know asserts can be turned off, so they obviously won't work for the 
> latter case, and having seen the sample of pycontract it seems it only 
> does its thing during debugging.
> 
> So is Design (Programming) by Contract a fancy way of saying "Document 
> your inputs/outputs!" or is there more to it?
> 
> ~Ethan~

Hmmm...

Well, from the (apparently) complete lack of interest, I shall take away 
the (better?) documentation ideas and unit testing ideas, and not worry 
about the rest.  :)

~Ethan~



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