
It is DESIGN by Contract after all
That's not strictly Eiffel;
Of course not. I don't think the concept is even original to Eiffel, but Bertrand Meyer certainly took the ideas then refined and developed them. The term "Design by Contract" is coined by Meyer and the Eiffel language is probably the best concrete implementation of DbC in a programming language.
However, it is DESIGN by Contract, not CODE by Contract. That's a clue that the concepts apply to something broader than a just a programming language. In fact, it is quite possible to design a system using DbC without ever having direct language support for DbC.
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-- Jim Weirich jim@weirichhouse.org [link|http://onestepback.org|http://onestepback.org]
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)