On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 09:45, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 6:36 PM Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 06:41, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 2:47 PM Marko Ristin-Kaufmann
> > > <marko.ris...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > * The contracts written in documentation as human text inevitably rot
> > > > and they are much harder to maintain than automatically verified formal
> > > > contracts.
> > >
> > > Agreed.
> >
> > Agreed, if contracts are automatically verified. But when runtime cost
> > comes up, people suggest that contracts can be disabled in production
> > code - which invalidates the "automatically verified" premise.
>
> Even if they're only verified as a dedicated testing pass ("okay,
> let's run the unit tests, let's run the contract verifier, let's run
> the type checker, cool, we're good"), they're still better off than
> unchecked comments/documentation in terms of code rot.
Absolutely. But if the contracts are checked at runtime, they are
precisely as good as tests - they will flag violations *in any
circumstances you check*. That's great, but nothing new. I understood
that one of the benefits of contracts was that it would handle cases
that you *forgot* to test - like assertions do, in essence - and would
need to be active in production (again, like assertions, if we assume
we've not explicitly chosen to run with assertions disabled) to get
that benefit.
There's certainly benefits for the "contracts as additional tests"
viewpoint. But whenever that's proposed as what people understand by
DbC, the response is "no, it's not like that at all". So going back to
the "why isn't DbC more popular" question - because no-one can get a
clear handle on whether they are "like tests" or "like assertions" or
"something else" :-)
Paul
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