Document number: N4024 Date: 2014-05-22 Project:

Reply-to: Nat Goodspeed ( nat at lindenlab dot com) Oliver Kowalke (oliver dot kowalke at gmail dot com) Distinguishing coroutines and fiber

Support for Design by Contract ™ in the

There is evidence that “contracts, ” or assertion techniques involving preconditions, postconditions, and invariants, have a positive effect on overall software quality. Regrettably, very few programming languages support these techniques. Since the advent of Bertrand Meyer’s Design by Contract ™ method, introduced in the language Eiffel, a number of systems have been built to implement support for contracts in more commonly-used languages. Such support has not been satisfactorily implemented in C#. In this paper, we compare the different approaches of existing systems and introduce Contract Sharp, a tool that provides support for contracts in C#.