May 25, 2010

Trammel

I was planning on making a grand announcement about the launch of my Clojure contracts programming library Trammel, but got totally upstaged by something called Clojure/core. ^_^

While researching for The Joy of Clojure I eventually came by a few books about the Eiffel Programming Language and was blown away by its notion of design by contract©. I’ve posted before about Clojure’s pre- and post-conditions but didn’t take it to the next step until chapter 7 of JoC — which forms the basis for Trammel. At the moment I have only the base form contract returning a higher-order function that can then be partially applied to an existing function to “apply” a contract:

(def cheese-contract (contract cheese [x] (requires (= x :cheese)) (ensures (string? %) (= % "cheese")) [x y] (requires (every? #(= :cheese %) [x y])) (ensures (string? %)))) (def do-something (partial cheese-contract (fn ([x] (name x)) ([x y] (str x y))))) (do-something :cheese) ;=> "cheese" (do-something :foo) ; java.lang.AssertionError: Assert failed: (= x :cheese) (do-something :cheese :cheese) ;=> ":cheese:cheese" (do-something :cheese :ham) ; java.lang.AssertionError: Assert failed: ; (every? (fn* [p1__6079#] (= :cheese p1__6079#)) [x y])

Anyway, Trammel is in its infancy but I think that I have a nice springboard for experimentation and expansion, including:

Abstracting out the use of partial (in progress) Better error messages Distinct pre and post exceptions An all-in-one defn/contract (in progress) Study the heck out of everything Bertrand Meyer ever wrote (in progress) Choose better names than requires and ensures Facilities for slackening requires and tightening ensures (in progress)

If you have any ideas or interesting references then I would be happy to discuss.

:f