johnson@cs.uiuc.edu (Ralph Johnson) (02/06/91)
One of the more successful reuse techniques is that of program skeletons. Program skeletons are an attempt to standardize the common reuse technique of taking an existing program and editing it until it fits the new task. A program skeleton is a complete program that reads arguments, handles errors, etc. but does not do much of anything. It has comments that tell the programmer where to make changes. Program skeletons used to be (and may still be) popular in the Macintosh world. I first ran into them a few months after the Mac came out. Every Mac program had to handle the menu, disk accessories, events, etc. Every program seemed to have a couple of hundred lines in common with every other program. Program skeletons made these lines reusable. I'm not trying to push program skeletons. Quite the reverse. However, I would like a reference for a paper I'm writing. Does anybody remember reading (or writing) a paper that describes them? Ralph Johnson -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign johnson@cs.uiuc.edu