Also, maybe you should have called them something else since a lot of people will think about completely different when they hear this word... (http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/doc/syntax/refinements_rd...)

In terms of my opinion of Racket/Pyret, though, there's been a number of Ruby projects to do similar stuff to this over the years, since it's trivial to add (just add a class method that redefines a method and wraps it in code to execute the contracts), and a lot of Ruby newbies try to find ways of adding back the restrictions they've lost when moving from statically typed languages.

Invariably they've ended up dying or not getting much interest, largely because a large part of the appeal of dynamic languages for a lot of people is that the code reads simple. In the Ruby world at least, aesthetics is a big deal. And putting the tests inline destroys that aesthetic and makes it harder to read the code.

Especially because tests tends to be trite and repetitive and contain a lot of stuff that is obvious to a human when you have the code right in front of you.

Especially when they go beyond documenting contracts that are intended to bind subclasses to an interface.

That code readability is important.

I have a prototype for my own Eiffel inspired language with DbC support, and my own experience with it was that as much as I love the idea, even Eiffel level contracts are bordering on being too verbose, for these reasons.

Pull them out into separate files, and they're a lot more acceptable, but then what is the difference from any other unit testing framework?