Polymorphism in Object-Oriented Contract Verification

The role that design by contract plays in the specification, monitoring, and reuse of classes is of increasing importance in the OO community. Although recognizably useful, nevertheless, because of lack of expressiveness of existing assertion languages, contracts can bring undesirable effects such as the increasing in class coupling when we deal with complex classes. A means of surpassing those problems was proposed in [7] Ð the concept of meta-assertion. These are assertions that allow to refer to other methods' assertions. The semantics that was given in [7] for meta-assertions, used static binding when deciding which assertions to verify. In that paper it was pointed out, as an important goal, that the dynamic type of the target object should be used when deciding which assertion to verify, in order to have, at the level of assertions, the same dynamic binding mechanism that we have in OO method calls. In this paper we present a semantics for meta-assertions and a process of t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SERP
• Authors: Isabel Nunes
• Keywords: Assertion Languages, Contract Plays, OO Community, SERP 2003, SERP 2007