Thesaurus-Based Methodologies and Tools for Maintaining Persistent Application Systems

The research presented in this thesis establishes thesauri as a viable foundation for models, methodologies and tools for change management. Most of the research has been undertaken in a persistent programming environment. Persistent language technology has enabled the construction of sophisticated and well-integrated change management tools; tools and applications reside in the same store. At the same time, the research has enhanced persistent programming environments with models, methodologies and tools that are crucial to the exploitation of persistent programming in construction and maintenance of long-lived, data-intensive application systems

On the Classification of Binding Mechanisms

Introduction In traditional programming languages, database management systems, file systems and operating systems there are a number of, often conflicting, binding mechanisms for composing sub-systems, programs and data. In our experiments in designing, building and using a persistent information space architecture (PISA) [3] we have encountered these binding mechanisms and wish to report on them here. We wish to build a total system capable of providing for all programming activity. Our traditional view of the persistent information space is that it will subsume the functions of a plethora of mechanisms currently supported by components such as command languages, editors, file systems, compilers and interpreters, linkage editors and binders, debuggers, DBMS sublanguages and graphics libraries[1]. The information space is composed of objects, which may be simple or highly structured, defined by the universe of discourse of the type system 2 of the PISA arch