The class invariant is an essential component of design by contract.

This forms an important part of the method of design by contract.

He created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contracts.

Design by contract tightly integrated with other language constructs.

Exception handling in Eiffel is based on the principles of design by contract.

Preconditions in object-oriented software development are an essential part of design by contract.

This constitutes a form of design by contract.

Design by contract also includes notions of postcondition and class invariant.

Many other paradigms are supported using extensions, including design by contract and logic programming.

As a consequence of the difficulty of reasoning, design by contract is effectively impossible.

The concept of Design by Contract is central to Eiffel.

His dissertation was on the linguistics of software contracts, popularly known as design by contract.

Design by contract also defines criteria for correctness for a software module:

Its design is heavily influenced by ideas from design by contract and component-based software engineering.

Design by contract has its roots in work on formal verification, formal specification and Hoare logic.

Design by contract can also facilitate code reuse, since the contract for each piece of code is fully documented.

The Design by Contract mechanisms are tightly integrated with the language and guide redefinition of features in inheritance:

Various libraries, preprocessors and other tools have been developed for existing programming languages without native Design by Contract support:

In object-oriented programming, postconditions, along with preconditions and class invariants are components of the software construction method design by contract.

Bertrand Meyer created the methodology Design by contract and incorporated it into the Eiffel programming language.

These are detailed in a terminology resembling that of design by contract methodology, leading to some restrictions on how contracts can interact with inheritance:

This benefit is complementary to Design by Contract as it approaches code through test cases rather than through mathematical assertions or preconceptions.

Design by contract uses preconditions, postconditions and invariants to ensure that provided data (and the state of the program as a whole) is sanitized.

Contract programming (Design by Contract)

Design by Contract with JML; Draft tutorial.