Assertions for C++

In this report I describe types of program annotations that could be used in C++ to enhance the testability, assurance, and overall quality of the code being developed. These annotations are formal, processable assertions which capture constraints and specifications which cannot be discerned from the program code itself. I first describe in some depth previous work in this area, and then try to apply this work to the C++ programming language. 1 Introduction Since their inception, programming languages and their design (and their designers) have taken the view that the programming language is meant to specify some behavior to a computing machine. Early programming "languages" were nothing more than a textual representation of the machine's instruction set. Though we now have languages that are much more distant from the machine in terms of their computational model, they still take a view of only providing the specification of behavior that the computational model is to undertake. This..