On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:42:10 +0200, Peter van Rooijen  
<peter at vanrooijen.com> wrote:

> You might enjoy studying a documentation feature of Eiffel called 'short  
> form'. The Eiffel programming language has a form of executable  
> OO-documentation that is inherited.

I remember that! I was going to do a series of articles on Eiffel--ooh,  
ten years ago now. Loved it as a language, but sort of lost interest when  
it took Meyer and Co. so long to come up with anything, and what they did  
have at first seemed so bug-ridden.

Not to cast aspersions, it was just disappointing after reading all the  
great stuff about programming-by-contract and how robust it was supposed  
to make everything.

> But the really cool part is that you can turn on a compiler switch and  
> have the executable documentation checked, at runtime, against the  
> actual code and get warned if the code and the executable documentation  
> disagree in any way.

Yeah, I noticed a lot of stuff I first read about in Meyer's Eiffel books  
made its way into C++.

> It's common for Eiffel developers to run their code with the compiler  
> switches set to run most, or all, of the checks. Thus, when they trust  
> their 'short form' documentation, they have a good reason to do so.

Sounds like the concept has been greatly refined since I read about it. I  
may have to check it out again. It had a lot going for it.