P. Singleton, "Applications of Meta-Programming to the Construction of Software Products from Generic Configurations", Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Science Dept., Keele University (1992).  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....21 Index of references . 23 1 Introduction 3 Storage and Retrieval of First order Terms using a Relational Database Paul Singleton O. Pearl Brereton 1 Introduction DERIVE [Sing92] is a novel deductive database for software development, in which configuration items are stored as facts, descriptions of products and of sub assemblies are encoded as rules, compilers (and similar derivation tools) are repackaged as (directed) relations, and from which deliverable products are ....

....the head of the clause 2.3 Special cases of term storage 5 that term) can be reconstructed. The traditional write and read procedures of Prolog achieve this (although they do not give the most compact representation) General term indexing is non trivial: there is, for example, no total ordering [Sing92] of stored terms such that all those which match each given pattern are adjacent, and indexed sequential access storage is inapplicable. Nor can we (or wish we to) rely on simplifying assumptions about likely patterns of access, or likely structures of stored terms: we want a completely general ....

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P. Singleton, "Applications of Meta-Programming to the Construction of Software Products from Generic Configurations", Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Science Dept., Keele University (1992).

....already exists, then it must be given the same name as the existing one. Thus the equality (or otherwise) of two file bodies is reflected in the equality (or otherwise) of their compact names. We call this scheme bigtexts with equality (hereafter just bigtexts) and implementation details are in [Sing92a] and [Sing92b] Bigtexts are never destructively updated: they begin life as uniquely named empty scratch files, created as necessary to capture the outputs of derivation tools; then they are interned as bigtexts. Ultimately they may be deleted in the course of garbage collection. The mapping ....

..... by unbundling tools, where feasible, into simpler components For example, a compiler may comprise a driving program for several underlying stages: by repackaging tools or their components within calling envelopes which suppress or correct their undesirable behaviour (examples are given in [Sing92a]) We urge all designers of derivation tools to make provision for this mode of use, by allowing noise to be switched off, defaults to be overridden, failures to be denoted by the exit status, etc. 3 Philosophy and rationale of DERIVE A software developer may find commercial advantage in having ....

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P. Singleton, "Applications of Meta-Programming to the Construction of Software Products from Generic Configurations", Ph.D. Thesis, Keele University (1992).

....in preference to task models , which is analogous to our preference for declarativity over imperativeness. He shows how a structural model can be mechanically interpreted to drive generic operations such as . print all source files ; compile the product . We have shown (in DERIVE [Sing92]) that, if the structural formalism is sufficiently abstract and expressive, it is possible to do all this and more, including: delete all derivable (i.e. redundant) items, to recover storage space; display (graphically) the structure of the configuration; summarise the parameterisation ....

....large values (e.g. compiled images of many megabytes) it also embraces arbitrarily large and complex tools (such as compilers and linkers) as if they were functions or relations over these values. The implementation techniques which we developed to support this approach are described elsewhere [Sing92]. We identified several major requirements of a system for building software: 1) minimal recompilation after small changes; 2) ability to build generic product releases; 3) ability to check completeness, feasibility and remaining variance in proposed builds; 4) traceability of components and ....

P. Singleton, "Applications of Meta-Programming to the Construction of Software Products from Generic Configurations", Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Science Department, Keele University, UK (1992).

.... include: pcm: an informal software prototyping and development environment which facilitates reuse of program fragments from a large library ( 20,000 procedures) Sing93a] DERIVE: a rigorous system for building software releases from highly variant configurations by pure deduction [Sing92]. Prolog s models of data and of computation vastly generalise those of the RDBMS, and it is an excellent host language for DB applications. The retrieval bandwidth from the RDBMS into Prolog is, however, currently poor enough to require that computation should be done within the RDBMS as far as ....

....bandwidth from the RDBMS into Prolog is, however, currently poor enough to require that computation should be done within the RDBMS as far as possible. This encourages a hybrid programming style e.g. for transitive closures [Sing90] It also encourages caching of data within the host software [Sing92]. This hybrid system displays much of the functionality which we seek in enhanced RDBMSs, although its programming model is not homogenous (applications must be programmed partly in each of Prolog and SQL, with explicit transfer of data between the two domains) and its [4] Probably the most ....

P. Singleton, "Applications of Meta-Programming to the Construction of Software Products from Generic Configurations", Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Science Dept., Keele University (1992).

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