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Finding Implicit Contracts in .NET Components

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Formal Methods for Components and Objects (FMCO 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2852))

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Abstract

Are contracts inherent in reusable libraries, or just one design technique among others? To help answer this question, we performed an empirical study of library classes from the .NET Collections library, which doesn’t use Design by ContractTM, to look for unexpressed contracts. This article reports on the buried contracts we have found, and discusses improvements to the architecture – especially to the libraries’ ease of learning and ease of use – that may result from making the contracts explicit. It extends previous reports [3,4,5,6] with an analysis of the benefits of an a posteriori addition of contracts for the library users.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Software Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), CH-8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Karine Arnout & Bertran Meyer

  2. Eiffel Software, 356 Storke Road, Santa Barbara, CA, 93117, USA

    Bertran Meyer

Authors
  1. Karine Arnout
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  2. Bertran Meyer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, CWI, Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank S. de Boer

  2. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9512, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Marcello M. Bonsangue

  3. VERIMAG, 2 Avenue de Vignate, Centre Equitation, 38610, Grenoble-Gières, France

    Susanne Graf

  4. Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Christian-Albrechts University Kiel, Hermann-Rodewald-Straße 3, 24118, Kiel, Germany

    Willem-Paul de Roever

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Arnout, K., Meyer, B. (2003). Finding Implicit Contracts in .NET Components. In: de Boer, F.S., Bonsangue, M.M., Graf, S., de Roever, WP. (eds) Formal Methods for Components and Objects. FMCO 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2852. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39656-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39656-7_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20303-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39656-7

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