Strengthening Eiffel Contracts using Models

Toward More Expressive Contracts

The principles of Design by Contract form the basis of the Eiffel approach and account for a good deal of its appeal. Eiffel's contracts are the result of a design trade-offbetween the full extent of formal specifications and what is acceptable to practicing software developers. The latter criterion has been critical: The ideas had to be practical; any competent programmer can immediately see t...

Eiffel as a Framework for Verification

The Eiffel method and language integrate a number of ideas originating from work on program verification. This position paper describes the goals of the Eiffel approach, presents current Eiffel-based verification techniques using contracts for run-time checks for testing and debugging, and outlines ongoing work on static verification.

Contracting and Proving Classes with Models

Functional specification and verification often requires specialized mathematicians to do the work. Software development and proving correctness are regarded as separate activities. We want developers to do the specification and verification. One of the promising approaches for letting developers create specifications is the “Design by Contract” methodology [7] as present in the Eiffel language...

Improving Relevancy of Dynamically-inferred Contracts in Eiffel

Skala University of West Bohemia

The use of various forms of contracts, like preconditions, are increasingly receiving more attention within Microsoft. This talk describes the design of Spec#, an experimental superset of the language C#, including preand postconditions and object invariants. Spec# gives rise to dynamic checks of contracts. The contracts can also be checked statically using the automatic checker Boogie. The tal...