Reusing Computer Code

Efficiency and using pretested and standardized code is useful.  Common data representations implied is also a good idea.

Automatic Code Reuse 

MIT News   By Larry Hardesty

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed CodeCarbonCopy, a system enabling programmers to transplant code between programs. Programmers can choose the code from one program and an insertion point in a second program, and the system will automatically make the required changes to fit the code within its new context. CodeCarbonCopy is capable of translating "data representations" used by the donor and recipient programs because it automatically maps the donor's scheme onto the recipient's. The transplantation procedure starts with feeding both the donor and recipient the same input file, and then CodeCarbonCopy compares how the two programs process the file. Data representation mapping involves analyzing the exact values that both programs store in memory, and CodeCarbonCopy creates a set of representation-translation operations if it finds a systematic relationship between the values. The system was presented this month at the ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in Germany. .... "