Taming the abstract data type
Carol Britton, Jill Doake, Richard Mitchell · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 1990
The overall aim of our research is to investigate the use of data abstraction in the early stages of the development of information systems. In this paper we suggest a simple classification of abstract data types as a guide to inexperienced system developers in the transition from an initial problem statement to a system description using data abstraction. The classification identifies different roles that abstract data types can play in a system description: providing simple values; providing the ability to calculate with simple values; providing the means to build tuples and sets from simpler types; and providing the means to express the required systems inputs and outputs.