Integrating non-intering versions of programs

Abstract

The need to integrate several versions of a program into a common one arises frequently, but it is a tedious and time consuming task to integrate programs by hand. The main contribution of this paper is an algorithm, called integrate, that takes as input three programs A, B, and Base, where A and B are two variants of Base. Whenever the changes made to Base to create A and B do not “interfere” (in a sense defined in the paper), Integrate produces a program M that integrates A and B.