Assertion (software development): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:41, 13 July 2023

Revision as of 19:02, 8 October 2023

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Programmers can use assertions to help specify programs and to reason about program correctness. For example, a [[precondition]]—an assertion placed at the beginning of a section of code—determines the set of states under which the programmer expects the code to execute. A [[postcondition]]—placed at the end—describes the expected state at the end of execution. For example: <code>x > 0 { x++ } x > 1</code>.

The example above uses the notation for including assertions used by [[C. A. R. Hoare]] in his 1969 article.<ref>[[C. A. R. Hoare]], [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1912 An axiomatic basis for computer programming], ''[[Communications of the ACM]]'', 1969.</ref> That notation cannot be used in existing mainstream programming languages. However, programmers can include unchecked assertions using the [[Comment (computer programming)|comment feature]] of their programming language. For example, in [[C (programming language)|C++]]:

<syntaxhighlight lang="C">