Software reuse: Some positive experiences (and sweeping conclusions)

Describes a software repository and development environment established to support prototyping and experimentation within our research group (which is primarily concerned with the application of knowledge-base techniques to software engineering). We claim an encouraging degree of software reuse, and consider (to various depths) four aspects of our approach which support this: programming language characteristics which affect component reusability; fine-grained component storage; keyword-based indexing and retrieval of reuse candidates; and tools for specializing reusable components