In a previous post to the Zend Developer Zone Keith Casey talked about the SOLID principles of software development, a set of guidelines that can help to make software more maintainable and easier to work with. In this new post he looks at the "L" in SOLID, the Liskov Substitution Principle.

So the Liskov Substitution Principle boils down to: method/class preconditions cannot be strengthened, method/class post conditions can't be weakened, all exceptions thrown must equally interchangeable and method signatures should be completely compatible.

To help make this all a bit clearer, he includes some code showing a basic class (Rectangle) and how difficult it can be to try to appease all of the principles above without the "fix one, break another" scenario. On comment to the post suggests something that might help things a bit - programming by contract.