Chapter 1. Enforcing Design: Constraints, Contracts, and Assertions
When we design software, we want it to be used in accordance with our designs. This is not vanity. In most cases it is all too easy to use software in a way for which it was not intended, and the results of doing so are invariably disappointing.
As I'm sure you already know from personal experience, the documentation for most software is incomplete and/or out of date. That's when it's not plain wrong or missing: “if there is any situation worse than having no documentation, it must be having wrong documentation” [Meye1997]. Documentation is not needed when the components being used are simple, well used, and either standard or ubiquitous. For example, I'd be surprised if many programmers ...
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