Software Components With Ada

Software Components with Ada

Software Engineering with Reusable Components

Software is rarely built completely from scratch. To a great extent, existing software documents (source code, design documents, etc.) are copied and adapted to fit new requirements. Yet we are far from the goal of making reuse the standard approach to software development. Software reuse is the process of creating software systems from existing software rather than building them from scratch. Software reuse is still an emerging discipline. It appears in many different forms from ad-hoc reuse to systematic reuse, and from white-box reuse to black-box reuse. Many different products for reuse range from ideas and algorithms to any documents that are created during the software life cycle. Source code is most commonly reused; thus many people misconceive software reuse as the reuse of source code alone. Recently source code and design reuse have become popular with (object-oriented) class libraries, application frameworks, and design patterns. Software components provide a vehicle for planned and systematic reuse. The software community does not yet agree on what a software component is exactly. Nowadays, the term component is used as a synonym for object most of the time, but it also stands for module or function. Recently the term component-based or component-oriented software development has be come popular. In this context components are defined as objects plus some thing. What something is exactly, or has to be for effective software develop ment, remains yet to be seen. However, systems and models are emerging to support that notion.

The Modula-2 Software Component Library

This book is the third and final volume in a series entitled "The Modula-2 Software Component Library." C. Lins' collection of reusable standard software components could be the basis for every programmer's software project in Modula-2. Components that are implementations of commonly used data structures are presented, along with a description of their functionality and efficiency. Moreover, the books provide the background necessary to tailor these components to the specific needs of any Modula-2 environment. For Modula-2 programmers, this series of books could prove as useful and indispensible as the original language reference by Niklaus Wirth. This third volume discusses the concepts of trees and graphs, shows their specifications, and provides implementations for various forms of trees and graphs.