Negotiated interfaces for software reuse

A significant barrier to the reuse of software is the rigid interface presented by a subroutine. For nontrivial data structures, it is unlikely that the existing form of the data of an application will match the requirements of a separately written subroutine. The authors describe two methods of interfacing existing data to a subroutine: generation of a program to convert the data to the form needed by the subroutine, and rewriting the subroutine, through compilation, to fit the existing data. Both methods can be invoked through easily used menu-based negotiation with the user. These methods have been implemented using the GLISP language and compiler.< >