Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation.

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.

I have always felt sympathy towards the biologists who accept to debate creationists. Now I also understand them better; one can fight opinions, not articles of faith.

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.