June 2010
Intermediate to advanced
456 pages
14h 48m
English
Ensuring program correctness is a topic of increasing importance in a world where we trust various computing systems, large and small, with ever more bits of our existence. This chapter introduces program correctness mechanisms that kick in at runtime (as opposed to typechecking and other semantic checks, which enforce certain correctness constraints during compilation). Runtime checks for program correctness are only partially related to error handling and should not be confused with it. More specifically, there are three intertwined but distinct areas lying under the generous umbrella of “when things go wrong”: