Reusing software developments
Allen Goldberg · 1990
Software development environments of the future will be characterized by extensive reuse of previous work. This paper addresses the issue of reusability in the context in which design is achieved by the transformational development of formal specifications into efficient implementations. It explores how an implementation of a modified specification can be realized by replaying the transformational derivation of the original and modifying it as required by changes made to the specification. Our approach is to structure derivations using the notion of tactics, and record derivation histories as an execution trace of the application of tactics. One key idea is that tactics are compositional: higher level tactics are constructed from more rudimentary using defined control primitives. This is similar to the approach used in LCF[12] and NuPRL[1, 8].