Hi there,

I am doing a master thesis on Design by Contract, and as part of it, I am doing a survey on DbC solutions. I have found the D programming language very interesting, and one of the few real attempts to bring DbC to mainstream programming.

After reading the site documentation, there are a couple of questions that I have, that you might be able to answer, namely:
* is it possible to specify pre/postconditions in constructors and private methods?
* is it possible to declare local variables within the 'in', 'out' or 'invariant' scope?
* is there any concurrency insurance in contract execution (if the method is declared as 'synchronized', will the contract also be thread-safe)?

Regarding the D authors' design options, I also have some questions:
* has the 'old' construct been considered?
* have interface contracts been considered (since D does not support multiple-inheritance)?
* has (automatic) documentation generation support for contracts been considered?
* has a finer grain of checking been considered, other that development/on and release/off (the ability to specify that contract checking for specific classes and/or specific assertion types)?

Thank you for your time,

Sérgio Agostinho

Reply to Sérgio_Agostinho,

> 
> * is it possible to specify pre/postconditions in constructors and
> private methods?

I'm no expert, but I would assume so (I haven't checked)

> 
> * is it possible to declare local variables within the 'in', 'out' or
> 'invariant' scope?
> 

again I would assume so

> Regarding the D authors' design options, I also have some questions:
> 
> * have interface contracts been considered (since D does not support
> multiple-inheritance)?

I has been proposed, but hasn't gone anywhere. I'd like to see it and an interface unittest that is run for any class that implements the interface.

> 
> * has a finer grain of checking been considered, other that
> development/on and release/off (the ability to specify that contract
> checking for specific classes and/or specific assertion types)?
> 

not explicitly, but you could get that effect with the version construct.

> Thank you for your time,
> 
> Sérgio Agostinho
> 

Your welcome, and I hope you enjoy D