A structural approach to the maintenance of structure-oriented environments

Abstract

A serious problem for programming environments and operating systems is that existing software becomes invalid when the environment or operating system is replaced by a new release. Unfortunately, there has been no systematic treatment of the problem; current approaches are manual, ad hoc, and time consuming both for implementers of programs and for their users. In this paper we present a new approach. Focusing on a solution to the problems for structure-oriented environments, we show how automatic converters can be generated in terms of an implementor's changes to formal descriptions of these environments.