Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!mailrus!ncar!husc6!m2c!umvlsi!chittamu
From: chittamu@umvlsi.ecs.umass.edu (Satish Kumar .C)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components
Subject: Re: maintenace and reuse
Message-ID: <468@umvlsi.ecs.umass.edu>
Date: 15 Oct 89 17:26:52 GMT
References: <130200014@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: chittamu@cs.umass.edu (Satish Kumar .C)
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Lines: 19

In article <130200014@p.cs.uiuc.edu> johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>Reusing code requires understanding it.  Understanding code
>requires at least reading the documentation, and sometimes
>reading the code.

I beg to differ. Reusing code requires understanding the *function* of
the code and not the code itself. If you know precisely what the code is
supposed to do, then you can reuse it without reading thro' the
implementation of it. If reusable code requires us to read thro' its
implementation, then in my opinion it is not truely reusable. It
defeats the very purpose of having package specification and module
interfaces. Reuse is fine. I am strong advocate of it. But not when I
have to read thro' the code.  The only thing I would necessarily need to
read is the documentation describing the purpose of the code.

-- 
	-Satish.
	chittamu@cs.umass.edu