A framework for proving contract-equipped classes

  • Authors:

  • Bertrand Meyer

  • Affiliations:

  • ETH Zürich, Chair of Software Engineering and Eiffel Software, Santa Barbara, and Monash University

  • Venue:
  • ASM'03 Proceedings of the abstract state machines 10th international conference on Advances in theory and practice
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

As part of a general effort to provide a new basis for software development through reuse of "Trusted Components", we outline a scheme for proving that classes equipped with contracts in the Eiffel style meet these contracts. The approach takes advantage of the inheritance structure to separate proof obligations between deferred (abstract) classes, to be validated against a model, and their effective implementations, which then must only be proved against the contracts of the deferred ancestors. The testbed for this study is the EiffelBase library of fundamental data structures and algorithms, whose classes include extensive contracts.