Adaptive Code Reuse By Aspects Cloning And Renaming

A. H. Bagge, M. Bravenboer, K. T. Kalleberg, K. Muilwijk, and E. Visser. Adaptive Code Reuse by Aspects, Cloning and Renaming. Technical Report UU-CS-2005-031, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, August 2005.

Abstract

Effective code reuse is desirable, but difficult to achieve in practice, since it is often necessary to adapt code before it can be reused successfully. The good old solution to code reuse is simple: copy, paste, then edit as needed. This is a brilliant idea, except for the maintenance problems it causes. In this paper we introduce a language extension for declaratively performing adaptive code reuse at compile-time. We decompose reuse into two operations; clone existing code, and adapt it to new requirements. The clone and adapt technique allows flexible code reuse, untangled from subtyping and other irrelevant features, and without the maintenance nightmare of copy and paste programming.