Specification driven development.

[Timon Gehr]

On 10/25/2011 12:48 AM, Alexey Veselovsky wrote:
>>> Hm... It is possible to split this single file to specification and
>>> implementation part (in single file, not split to 2 different files)?
>>> Like in Haskell for example or Object Pascal.
>>
>> You could maybe put contracts on interface methods and then implement those
>> interfaces (even from different source files). But DbC has not gotten too
>> much attention from the compiler developers lately, so I think there might
>> be some unresolved bugs in DbC.
>
> Yep. Looks like in D only one way for real modularity: emulate it via
> OOP (like in c++ or java, where all is object (yes, I know, in C++ not
> all is object, but in C++ module is emulated via classes and
> objects)).

Eventually it should be possible to put contracts on free function 
declarations (with the current language version, it only works for 
function definitions). But I am sure that OOP is not the only way to get 
real modularity in D. Given it's compile-time capabilities it is 
probably already possible to implement some ad-hoc system to allow for 
nice modular specification driven development. The language is pretty 
flexible. What would be the ideal set of features to support modularity 
in your opinion?