Supporting Software Development through Declaratively Codified Programming Patterns

Abstract

In current-day software development, programmers often use programming patterns to clarify their intents and to increase the understandability of their programs. Unfortunately, most software development environments do not adequately support the declaration and use of such patterns. To explicitly codify these patterns, we adopt a declarative meta-programming approach. In this approach, we reify the structure of an (object-oriented) program in terms of logic clauses. We declare programming patterns as logic rules on top of these clauses. By querying the logic system, these rules allow us to check, enforce and search for occurrences of patterns in the software. As such, the programming patterns become an active part of the development and maintenance environment.