Experience using the Graphite meta-tool

Graphite is a metatool for generating Ada source code for graph structure manipulation from a concise specification of a graph structure. The author reports an experiment in which Graphite was used to generate part of the code for a simple hierarchical data management tool. The experiment showed that the use of Graphite improved productivity, code quality, and flexibility and allowed a number of important concerns to be separated. The results prompt speculations about generalizing meta-tools into metaparts that can be used in a wide spectrum of applications, and about ways to improve the utility and applicability of such metaparts