Constraining the Structure and Style of Object-Oriented Programs

Object-oriented languages fail to provide software developers with a way to say many of the things about their systems that they need to be able to say. To address this need, we have designed and implemented a language for use with C++ that allows software developers to express a wide variety of constraints on the designs and implementations of the systems they build. Our language is specifically designed for use with C++, but the issues it addresses are applicable to other object-oriented languages, and the fundamental software architecture used to implement our system could be applied without modification to similar constraint languages for other object-oriented programming languages. 1 Introduction C++ is an expressive language, but it does not allow software developers to say many of the things about their systems that they need to be able to say. In particular, C++ offers no way to express many important constraints on a system's design, implementation, and stylistic conventions...