An experiment on reusing program specifications described by conceptual data model and dependency constraint-based language

A reusable specification describes a domain but not individual programs with the declarative language PSDL based on the conceptual data model and the dependency constraints, and with hierarchically arranged conceptual schemata. Various program specifications are extracted from the reusable specification and are transformed into C programs by the PSDL compiler. The authors implemented the prototype system, called the SoftReuse System, supporting these facilities, and tested the system with an actual social insurance domain example. The experiment estimated that specification reuse was more productive than procedural code reuse. The reusable specification described with PSDL and conceptual schemata showed a good balance between the object-oriented and functional decomposition approaches. The experiment also pointed out that the comprehensibility of the reusable specification was one of the most important issues to be studied in the future