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From: Ken Garlington <kennieg@flash.net>
Subject: Re: Safety-critical development in Ada and Eiffel
Date: 1997/08/15
Message-ID: <33F44261.7BD3@flash.net>#1/1
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References: <33E9ADE9.4709@flash.net> <EEsF5y.F5H@syd.csa.com.au>
 <JSA.97Aug12131358@alexandria.organon.com> <33F133D7.71AC@erols.com>
 <33F25933.7F83@flash.net> <33F27B5C.6A3C@erols.com>
Organization: Flashnet Communications, http://www.flash.net
Reply-To: Ken.Garlington@computer.org
Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel
Date: 1997-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Ted Velkoff wrote:
> 
> Ken Garlington responded to an earlier post of mine:
> >
> > This is certainly reasonable. However, once the execution capabilities
> > are removed, it seems fair to ask what Eiffel provides that comments
> > (available in most langauges) don't provide. If there is not a
> > significant
> > difference, then Eiffel would not be any better (in this context) than
> > any other language, so long as the DBC principles were followed.
> >
> 
> In my experience, there is a significant difference.  I will not presume
> to make a scientific claim; rather I will offer a personal, anecdotal
> example.
> 
> About two years ago, I built a modest enhancement to a system which
> amounted to 4K lines each of Ada and C++.  In the package specs and
> module headers I included preconditions, postconditions and invariants
> as comments.  In the Ada bodies, I wrote if-then-else clauses to test
> preconditions (violations led to a chain of exceptions raised out to
> the main program).  In the C++ implementations, I included conditionally
> compiled calls to the assert macro (which does a core dump and spits out
> a file and line number) for preconditions and trivial
> postconditions.

I think you're anwering the wrong mail :)

Please re-read the first paragraph. The discussion is about the value of
Eiffel assertions if they are _always_ turned off, vs. comments.