2012/9/6 Lorenzo Caminiti <lorcaminiti@gmail.com>
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 7:05 AM, ecyrbe <ecyrbe@gmail.com> wrote:
I vote NO for the inclusion of the contract library in Boost.
Thanks a lot for submitting a review!
I think my tone could seem a litle rude. I forgot to congratulate you for the long a hard work you have done on this library.
I do agree that the work done is really interresting, but i don't think that using MACROS are the way to add this functionnality.
Sure this'd be ideal but... do you have any suggestion on how to implement Contract Programming within C++ without using macro? I thought about this problem a lot (that of "not using macros" was even an original goal when I started creating the library 4+ years ago) but I had to conclude it's impossible... For example (and there are more examples like this) how would you implement the following CP requirements without macros? 1. If a function is not public, don't check class invariants. 2. Subcontracting.
I would like to comment on this. I know that making a Eiffel like integrated contract programming in c++ in not feasible. But i think that an original one, maybe based on functors could be possible (may be i'm totally wrong). something declared like a boost::function<Signature>, but using something like : boost::contract<Signature> push_back; and has to be initialized like this : push_back(precondition_functor, real_push_back_functor,postcondition_functor); and if any invariant is declared : push_back(precondition_functor, real_push_back_method,postcondition_functor, invariant_functor); I know that it's not easy to implement functors in c++03 , but in c++11 with lambdas, you could initialize this really easily, and still have a nice library. For c++03, you still could provide a macro frontend to allow users to implement this easily, but having a more native way to do it in c++11 would be awesome. What i want to say, is that, i would have said YES to this macro frontend if a nice c++11 compliant backend was exposed to those that don't want to use macros. These are only thoughts. Thanks for reading.