A problem with D contracts

[Walter Bright]

Norbert Nemec wrote:
> I agree that contracts offer too much liberty. However, I would actually 
> go one step further than bearophile:
> 
> I find the need for "assert" statements not only superfluous but 
> actually misleading. A contract violation is something conceptionally 
> different from a broken assertion. Assertions and contracts have 
> different purposes.

In what way are their purposes different?


> In my opinion, contracts should not be lists of statements but simply 
> boolean expressions that have to evaluate to true. Contract checks would 
> then become decoupled from assertion checks. Both could be switched 
> independently at compile time.
> 
> For any case where the contract is more complex than what can be handled 
> by an expression, one should simply define a pure function, which would 
> even help to unclutter the code and keep contract short and concise to 
> read.

I think that's a stylistic issue, not a language one.