Spec-driven development of code. Sorry for not specifying. (Irony? ;-)) Yes, that'd be an example of the tests / specs I'm talking about. I'm also suggesting that the programmer needs to be encouraged and made aware of their assumptions and requirements for doing something - hence baking them into the language / IDE (workspace / class browser) itself. This is essential in the documentation process, for inspection of code.
For example, if my entire operating system had been written in this theoretical spec-driven environment, I could look at it bit by bit and essentially teach myself what was encoded into the specs and learn how the operating system works at any level I'm interested in. I'm not stipulating this for restriction, only encouragement. "Checksumming" would allow the code to be quickly checked for correctness before running each time, or put a different way - code could not be compiled until the specs / tests had run through passing. I think this is better off baked in because it would encourage programmers (users of the language) to write down what they intend to do before they do it. Something most people do whenever they're going to do something complicated anyway. It would encourage people to take care and to not code things quickly, but it would also provide regression tests. This level of spec-driven / self-testing could not be performed as a principle and a general process as easily as if the environment / language was aware of it. Regards, Julian On 11/10/2010, at 1:11 PM, K. K. Subramaniam wrote: > On Sunday 10 Oct 2010 10:51:44 pm Julian Leviston wrote: >> Does anyone know about a language (possibly something in smalltalk) that >> involves spec-driven development? > Spec-driven development of what? There have been many attempts at encoding > specifications (purely descriptive code without imperatvie components) but > they > are all highly domain-specific. See "Specification Language" in Wikipedia for > starters. > > Smalltalk uses a prototyping approach - build as you go. It does support > "assert" statements to capture invariants. e.g. > > self assert: myclass instVarNames isEmpty. > > and a Test framework (See SUnit-* Packages in Squeak) for validations.. > > Subbu _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
