Abstract
It is often asserted that our ability to reuse programs is limited primarily by the power of programming language abstraction mechanisms. We argue that, on the basis of performance considerations, this is just not the case in practice—these “generalization” mechanisms must be complemented by techniques to adapt the generalized structures to specific applications. Based on this argument, we consider a view of programming experience as a network of programs that are generalizations and specializations on one another and that are interconnected by appropriate program derivation fragments. We support this view with a number of examples. These examples illustrate the important role of abstract data type boundaries in program derivation.
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© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Scherlis, W.L. (1987). Abstract data types, specialization, and program reuse. In: Conradi, R., Didriksen, T.M., Wanvik, D.H. (eds) Advanced Programming Environments. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 244. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-17189-4_112
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-17189-4_112
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