orr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) (07/30/88)
Now that we have the tools in OO languages to provide effective reuse mechanisms,
I wonder if people see any hope for the great dream of large numbers of publicly
available software components that the developer can take, stick together with a
few pieces of glue, and get a working reliable system.
I am, of course, aware of the great work done by Keith Gorlen in this direction,
but I wonder if there is any hope of going a stage further. Keith (and others) have
provided the basic building blocks for software - abstract data types - is there
any hope of providing higher level components like text editors, high level graphics
descriptions, file maintainers etc, and no doubt I've missed out a level in between.
How does the idea of a new newsgroup, similar to comp.sources.unix, that doesn't
take complete programs but program modules that might be considered to be useful
to others. Everyone, when writting programs writes at least a few modules that
might be generally useful, and with a small amount of effort on the programmer's
part ( well repaid by the benifits of having such a resource avaliable) the module
could be generalised and made even more useful. Documentation like man pages could
be provided (or even better, documentation of the quality used in the OOPS library)
and a list of the avaliable software could be published every month.
Am I just dreaming, or is this a realistic possibility?
P.S. This is just in comp.lang.c++ for the moment since it might be interesting
consider the newsgroup full of C++ classes. It might be interesting to migrate
the discussion onto comp.software-eng in future.
==Fraser Orr ( Dept C.S., Univ. Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK)
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ARPANet(preferred xAtlantic): orr%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.ukhenry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/03/88)
In article <1546@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.ucl.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes: >How does the idea of a new newsgroup, similar to comp.sources.unix, that >doesn't take complete programs but program modules that might be considered >to be useful to others... Comp.sources.unix already takes things like library functions, so there is no need for a new newsgroup for this. -- MSDOS is not dead, it just | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology smells that way. | uunet!mnetor!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu