Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
In the past few weeks I wrote a program to compute the aliases of variables and expressions in an object-oriented program (based on a new theory [1]). For one of the data structures, I needed a specific notion of equality, so I did the standard thing in Eiffel: redefine the is_equal function inherited from the … Read more
A spectre is haunting programming — the spectre of null-pointer dereferencing. All the programming languages of old Europe and the New World have entered into a holy alliance to make everyone’s programs brittle: Java, C, Pascal, C++, C# and yes, until recently, Eiffel. The culprit is the use of references to denote objects used in calls: … Read more
What kind of contract do you write? Could these contracts, or some of them, be produced automatically? The idea of inferring contracts from programs is intriguing; it also raises serious epistemological issues. In fact, one may question whether it makes any sense at all. I will leave the question of principle to another post, in … Read more