Bertrand Meyer

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l'escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought, like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests - if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over.

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.

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

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

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

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