Nested and dynamic contract boundaries

  • Authors:
  • T. Stephen Strickland;Matthias Felleisen

  • Affiliations:
  • PLT @ Northeastern University;PLT @ Northeastern University

  • Venue:
  • IFL'09 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Implementation and application of functional languages
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Previous work on software contracts assumes fixed and statically known boundaries between the parties to a contract. Implementations of contract monitoring systems rely on this assumption to explain the nature of contract violations and to assign blame to violators. In this paper, we explain how to implement arbitrary, nested, and dynamic contract boundaries with two examples. First, we add nestable contract regions to a static, first-order module system. Second, we show that even a dynamic, higher-order, and hierarchical module system can be equipped with software contracts that support precise blame assignment.