Programming by contract
Programming by contract is a software design technique that specifies component obligations through preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.
Object-Oriented Software Design in C++
Programming by contract is a software design technique that specifies preconditions, postconditions, and invariants for program components and may check them during execution.
- How it is used
- Uses explicit contracts to prevent surprising behavior in classes, member functions, and subclass hierarchies.
- How deep it goes
- Explains responsibilities, runtime assertions, a CircularBuffer implementation, and inheritance constraints, but does not provide native C++ contract syntax.
- Examples
- Demonstrates contracts with CircularBuffer operations and Shipment, Expedited, and International subclasses.
- What you can do after
- Apply it by documenting and asserting class contracts, checking caller obligations, and evaluating subclass overrides for compatibility.
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Software Design for Python Programmers
Programming by contract is a software development technique that specifies component obligations through preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.
- How it is used
- Uses explicit contracts to prevent surprising runtime behavior in classes and methods.
- How deep it goes
- Defines three contract elements and demonstrates assertion-based implementation, while deferring native Python support and deployment strategy.
- Examples
- Demonstrates a CircularBuffer and Shipment subclasses with cost preconditions, day postconditions, assertions, and custom exceptions.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Python assertions, predicate methods, and exceptions to specify and enforce critical class behavior.
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Functional Design and Architecture: Examples in Haskell
A software-design technique that expresses behavioral contracts explicitly and checks implementations against them.
- How it is used
- Uses explicit contracts to make object-oriented subsystem behavior predictable and implementations accountable.
- How deep it goes
- Defines explicit contracts and illustrates a violation, but does not detail a specific contract-checking tool or formal notation.
- Examples
- Uses ILampSwitcher, DaylightLamp, TableLamp, exceptions, global state, absent files, and memory operations as contract cases.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose implementations that violate client-facing behavioral contracts and recognize why substitutions become unsafe.
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Related concepts
- C++contrasts with · C++ is a statically typed, general-purpose programming language supporting procedural, object-oriented, generic, and low-level systems programming.
- preconditionuses · A precondition is a condition or requirement that must be satisfied before an operation, process, or action can proceed correctly.
- postconditionhas part · A postcondition is a property or condition that must hold after an operation completes successfully.
- inheritanceused by · Inheritance is a mechanism by which a child type or element receives properties, values, or behavior from a parent, subject to system rules and possible overrides.
- exceptionhas part · An exception is a runtime signal or object representing an abnormal condition that interrupts ordinary program flow and may be handled or propagated.
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