Reviews

Researching into Teaching Methods in Colleges and Universities by Clinton Bennett, Lorraine Foreman‐Peck and Chris Higgins, London: Kogan Page, 1996. ISBN: 0–7494–1768–4, 136 (+ vii) pages, paperback. £14.99

Interactive Query Language for Code Comprehension

Code comprehension is a fundamental task for software development. Every bug fix, maintenance or new feature development requires the whole understanding of the affectedcode. There exist a number of code comprehension tools but most of them has a limitedfeature set and they are binded with a fixed (usually) graphical user interface. This putlimitations for their use. In this thesis we will define a flexible but safe query language to execute the most fundamental comprehension queries against a large code base. We will investigate how much this language could be language agnostic and how to support specificlanguage features. I will implement a prototype tool to prove the concept using the opensource CodeCompass code comprehension platform. In this prototype i mainly target C and C++ languages

The C++0x "Concepts" Effort

C++0x is the working title for the revision of the ISO standard of the C++ programming language that was originally planned for release in 2009 but that was delayed to 2011. The largest language extension in C++0x was "concepts", that is, a collection of features for constraining template parameters. In September of 2008, the C++ standards committee voted the concepts extension into C++0x, but then in July of 2009, the committee voted the concepts extension back out of C++0x. This article is my account of the technical challenges and debates within the "concepts" effort in the years 2003 to 2009. To provide some background, the article also describes the design space for constrained parametric polymorphism, or what is colloquially know as constrained generics. While this article is meant to be generally accessible, the writing is aimed toward readers with background in functional programming and programming language theory. This article grew out of a lecture at the Spring School on Generic and Indexed Programming at the University of Oxford, March 2010

Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking

Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized