Jotting #4: Revealing intent …

Java does not support Design-by-Contract (pre- and post-conditions, invariants) and asserts are really just a weak placebo.

Nevertheless, you can at least indicate your intentions to some degree with labels:

public void foo(Bar theX, ...) {

   pre_condition: { vetoArgument( null==theX, "Bar argument is null" ); }

   // some code

   post_condition: { ... }

}

where vetoArgument is some helper method to throw an IllegalArgumentException or the like.

Labels are a somewhat under-used feature of Java. But it’s still not the full DBC feature I’d like to see. Annotations will not be able to substitute for proper built-in language support. How long do we still have to wait?