Title
An extended account of contract monitoring strategies as patterns of communication.
Abstract
Contract systems have come to play a vital role in many aspects of software engineering. This has resulted in a wide variety of approaches to enforcing contracts-ranging from the straightforward pre-condition and post-condition checking of Eiffel to lazy, optional, and parallel enforcement strategies. Each of these approaches has its merits, but each has required ground-up development of an entire contract monitoring system. We present a unified approach to understanding this variety, while also opening the door to as-yet-undiscovered strategies. By observing that contracts are fundamentally about communication between a program and a monitor, we reframe contract checking as communication between concurrent processes. This brings out the underlying relations between widely studied enforcement strategies, including strict and lazy enforcement as well as concurrent approaches, including new contracts and strategies. We show how each of these can be embedded into a core calculus, and demonstrate a proof (via simulation) of correctness for one such encoding. Finally, we show that our approach suggests new monitoring approaches and contracts not previously expressible.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1017/S0956796818000047
JOURNAL OF FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING
Field
DocType
Volume
Cognitive reframing,Programming language,Monitoring system,Computer science,Correctness,Enforcement,Eiffel,Encoding (memory)
Journal
28
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0956-7968
0
0.34
References 
Authors
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cameron Swords1422.42
Amr Sabry252035.46
Sam Tobin-Hochstadt339124.82