Changing a program you don’t know

How might a language help solve the problems of those who wish to safely add code to a big project that they don’t understand very well.

Well, such a language might make it hard to build a program with the “pragma assert”s stripped out. (Stripping asserts is a powerful tool for those who spend time “proving the correctness of programs” or who, in the dark recesses of their minds, agree with the thinking of the early days of computers: “A bug?!? Why, that’s so totally unexpected!”)

And, could you be encouraged to write self-test code that does not execute in-line, but rather works kind of like a conditional hardware breakpoint at a higher, more complex level?

Heck, there’s gotta be some way to keep all these multi-core CPUs busy.

Now, if you could build a system that wrote such high-level, self-test code – that would be kinda interesting.

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