Design by Contract
The work
| Title | Design by Contract |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bertrand Meyer |
| Type | chapter in a collection |
| Year | 1991 |
| Citekey | meyer1991design |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Advances in Object-Oriented Software Engineering |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Prentice-Hall |
| Pages | 1--50 |
Abstract
This chapter is a contribution to software reliability. It presents a view of software design based on a metaphor: software construction as a succession of documented contracting decisions. This idea provides insights into a number of issues faced by programmers whenever they try to construct correct and robust software. Two results of the approach developed in this paper are a coherent approach to the handling of failures and exceptions, believed to be both simpler and safer than earlier techniques, and a coherent interpretation of two important but potentially unsafe aspects of object-oriented programming: inheritance and dynamic binding. The discussion relies on the Eiffel object-oriented language and environment.
Copy held
| Kind | PDF, 2.7 MB |
|---|---|
| Retrieved | 2026-08-08 |
| Held | local, for personal reference |
Where this came from
| How it got here | already cited · cited in bibtex |
|---|---|
| First seen | 2026-08-08 |
| Record | reviewed by a person |
| Approved | 2026-08-16 |
Cite it as
@incollection{meyer1991design,
title = {Design by Contract},
author = {Bertrand Meyer},
year = {1991},
booktitle = {Advances in Object-Oriented Software Engineering},
pages = {1--50},
publisher = {Prentice-Hall},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/meyer1991design/ and will keep doing so.