{"id":158436,"date":"2010-03-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/embedded-contract-languages\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:20:28","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:20:28","slug":"embedded-contract-languages","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/embedded-contract-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Embedded Contract Languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Specifying application interfaces (APIs) with information that goes beyond method argument and return types is a long-standing quest of programming language researchers and practitioners. The number of type system extensions or specification languages is roughly equal to the number of tools that consume them. In other words, every tool comes with its own specification language. In this paper we argue that for modern object-oriented languages, using an embedding of contracts as code is a better approach. We exemplify our embedding of Code Contracts on the Microsoft managed execution platform (.NET) using the C# programming language. The embedding works as well in Visual Basic. We discuss the numerous advantages of our approach and the technical challenges, as well as the status of tools that consume the embedded contracts<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Specifying application interfaces (APIs) with information that goes beyond method argument and return types is a long-standing quest of programming language researchers and practitioners. The number of type system extensions or specification languages is roughly equal to the number of tools that consume them. In other words, every tool comes with its own specification language. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"maf"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"mbarnett"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"logozzo"}],"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"ACM SAC - OOPS","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"ACM SAC - OOPS","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"Copyright \u00a9 2007 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and\/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. 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The contracts take the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Code Contracts is now Open Source! Code Contracts is now an open source project in GitHub. 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