On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 04:47:48PM +0100, David MENTRE wrote:
> Does anybody know if there is research on design-by-contract (as used in
> Eiffel or Spark) and type inference (as used in OCaml)?

I happen to have recently done a little something in this area, though not in an
object-oriented setting.  Other than the citations in my related work section,
there is a presentation adjacent to mine at ESOP that does some inference in a
dependent type system (cited below).

@inproceedings{
   title = "Type Reconstruction for General Refinement Types",
   author =  "Kenneth Knowles and Cormac Flanagan",
   booktitle = "ESOP",
   year = 2007,
   url = "http://kenn.frap.net/publications/knowles-flanagan.esop.07.type.pdf"
}

@inproceedings{
   title = "Dependent Types for Low-Level Programming",
   author = "Jeremy Condit and Matthew Harren and Zachary Anderson and David Gay and George C. Necula",
   booktitle = "ESOP",
   year = "2007"
}

Hope these help,

- Kenn