A Calculus of Program Adaptation and Its Applications

Traditional programming calculi focus on transforming a specification into a program. With the advent of such recent paradigms as white box reuse, component-based software development, and reengineering, and with the continued predominance of software maintenance, less and less software engineering activity nowadays deals with straightforward development. More and more, software products are derived by incrementing, composing, merging, or otherwise modifying existing components. In this paper we present a calculus that models these paradigms. Keywords Formal specifications, Programming calculi, Program construction, Software merging, Software incrementation, Software modification. 1 Program Adaptation: An Emerging Paradigm Traditional programming paradigms revolve around mapping a single requirements specification into a program. As less and less software is developed from scratch, and more and more is developed from existing software artifacts, this traditional paradigm is growing l..