Constraints -//- first release -//- Flexible abstract class based validation for attributes, functions and code blocks

[Devin Jeanpierre]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 3:24 PM, Nathan Rice
<nathan.alexander.rice at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the nice things about Haskell is that the language is designed
> in a way that is conducive to
> proving things about your code.  A side benefit of being able to prove
> things about your code is that
> in some cases you will be able to derive code just from well crafted
> specifications (like higher order
> Prolog).  This isn't a game changer yet, but with advances in theorem
> proving software and a thoughtful
> language ontology, I could see it taking off very soon.  Dijkstra was
> focused primarily on this area for the
> last 25 years of his life.

May I suggest a look at languages such as ATS and Epigram? They use
types that constrain values specifically to prove things about your
program. Haskell is a step, but as far as proving goes, it's less
powerful than it could be. ATS allows you to, at compile-time, declare
that isinstance(x, 0 <= Symbol() < len(L)) for some list L. So it
might align well with your ideas.

>> Probably deserves a better name than "constraintslib", that makes one
>> think of constraint satisfaction.
>
> As you can probably tell from my other projects, I'm bad at coming up
> with snappy names.

I'm bad at doing research on previous projects ;)

I'm sure another name will come up as the goals mature/solidify.

-- Devin