Signature Matching: A Key to Reuse
Authors: Amy Moormann Zaremski and Jeannette M. Wing
Appears in Proceedings of SIGSOFT '93, December 1993.
The full text of this paper is here (in
PostScript).
Abstract
Software reuse is only effective if it is easier to locate (and
appropriately modify) a reusable component than to write it from
scratch.
We present signature matching as a method for achieving this
goal by using signature information easily derived from the component.
We consider two kinds of software components, functions and modules,
and hence two kinds of matching, function matching and module
matching. The signature of a function is simply its type; the
signature of a module is a multiset of user-defined types and a
multiset of function signatures. For both functions and modules, we
consider not just exact match, but also various flavors of
relaxed match. We briefly describe an experimental facility written
in Standard ML for performing signature matching over a library of ML
functions.