Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools

7. Constraints and Validation

Introduction

When you’re programming with general purpose languages such as C# or Java, errors come in many flavors. You can mistype a keyword and get a lexical error, or you can get the order of a construct wrong and get a syntax error. These errors are the results of implicit constraints that the language imposes upon the stream of simple text that you pass to it. Strongly typed languages incorporate a type system into these constraints and produce errors at compile time, for example, when you try to set the value of a variable defined as an integer to a string value.

For many years now, good mainstream programming practice has suggested that assertions be used to impose further explicit constraints on what parameter ...