dbc¶ ↑

Design By Contract implemented for Ruby.

DBC, among other things, is a staple of the design concept, “Fail early, fail hard.” That is, it is better to catch problems earlier on rather than later. DBC does this by specifying input/output requirements of code, typically functions. When these constraints are broken, the DBC library causes a hard-fail of the system.

A classic example of DBC in actions would be to checking the divisor in a division is non-zero. This would be written as

def division(a, b)
  DBC.require(b != 0, "Divisor must be non-zero")  

  a / b
end

See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract for more details.

Copyright © 2009 Mat Holroyd. See LICENSE for details.