Is D still alive?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/28/11 10:14 AM, Roman Ivanov wrote:
> == Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org)'s article
>> On 1/27/11 8:02 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I think one of the reasons DbC has not paid off is it still requires a
>>> significant investment of effort by the programmer. It's too easy to not
>>> bother.
>> One issue with DbC is that its only significant advantage is its
>> interplay with inheritance. Otherwise, scope() in conjunction with
>> assert works with less syntactic overhead. So DbC tends to shine with
>> large and deep hierarchies... but large and deep hierarchies are not
>> that a la mode anymore.
>
> DbC opens many interesting possibilities if it's supported by tools other than
> just the compiler. MS has included it in .NET 4.0:
>
> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/

Hm, I'm seeing in section 3 of userdoc.pdf that they don't care for 
precondition weakening:

"While we could allow a weaker precondition, we have found that the 
complications of doing so outweigh the benefits. We just haven’t seen 
any compelling examples where weakening the precondition is useful. So 
we do not allow adding any preconditions at all in a subtype."

They do, however, allow strenghtening postconditions.

Overall the project looks very interesting and has quite recognizable 
names from the PL community. Hopefully it will increase awareness of 
contract programming.


Andrei