Toward a Formal Theory of Extensible Software
Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen
ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 1998
Abstract
As software projects continue to grow in scale and scope, it becomes important to reuse software. An important kind of reuse is extensibility, i.e., the extension of software without accessing existing code to edit or copy it. In this paper, we propose a rigorous, semantics-based definition of software extensibility. Then we illustrate the utility of our definitions by applying them to several programs. The examination shows how programming style affects extensibility and also drives the creation of a variant of an existing design pattern. We consider programs in both object-oriented and functional languages to prove the robustness of our definitions.
Paper
These papers may differ in formatting from the versions that appear in print. They are made available only to support the rapid dissemination of results; the printed versions, not these, should be considered definitive. The copyrights belong to their respective owners.