"Documentation by paper"

[Joe Buck]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 10:55:21AM -0500, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Of course my anticipated response is that the spec should ALWAYS be
> written first. A nice property of Ada is that it mandates this at
> the language level (you can't compile a package body without
> compiling the spec :-)

Robert, the Ada interface description is far from a spec, for any
nontrivial function.  Almost any real spec will describe restrictions
on input, and guarantees about the output, that are not written
in a form that the compiler parses (even in languages like Eiffel with
support for preconditions and postconditions).  This means that we
are back to comments.