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From: paul@athertn.Atherton.COM (Paul Sander)
Newsgroups: comp.sw.components
Subject: Re: Need for multiple implementations
Summary: But need they be interchangeable?
Message-ID: <28172@athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 2 Aug 90 16:51:11 GMT
References: <82613@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: paul@Atherton.COM (Paul Sander)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 47

In article <82613@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> murali@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
(S Muralidharan) writes:
>I am surprised to read that the need for multiple implementations of an
>abstraction (specifically, almost constant function) is not obvious.
>The almost constant function is an excellent example to demonstrate why you
>need multiple implementations.  There are several implementations (e.g.,
>BST, hashed search, etc.), and no one has better performance behavior than
>others in all repects.  A client of this abstracion will choose one of the
>several implementations based on performance requirements.

There is some truth to this; hashing is much faster for insertion and
retrieval (usually) than a tree structure is.  In those applications where
retrieval is done much more often than traversal, a hashing implementation
would be more suitable than a tree structure.  But some of the discussion
in the "What is a software component?" thread has been along the lines of
"not only should there be multiple implementations of an abstraction, they
should be interchangeable", which I personally don't believe.

I guess there are many levels of abstraction, some of which are more suited
to having reusable implementations written than others.  For example, a data
structure with very well-defined performance characteristics but that might
require some implementation details or configuration switches be visible to
its client might be more suitable for a reusable implementation than an almost
constant function, which might use any of a number of data structures.
To replace the underlying data structure of an almost constant function might
necessarily require tweaking some code below the interface of the function,
but above the interface to the data structure.

Looking at the problem from a different perspective, the data structure may
not know enough about its client's data to effectively implement an almost
constant function.  Abstraction at such a high level seems to require an
intimacy with the client's data that a truly reusable component just
wouldn't have.

So, there is a trade-off.  A reusable component must have a general enough
interface that it can be used with a wide variety of data types that might
be stored in it.  A client must have a very high level abstraction that
can be tuned for good performance and resource utilization without changing
its interface.  Either can be met in practice, but not both at the same time.
So people write thin wrappers (or "glue" logic) for reusable data structures
(or reimplement data structures) that meet the specification of their
abstract function, and complain that there are no good reusable
implementations of their abstractions.
-- 
Paul Sander        (408) 734-9822  | "Passwords are like underwear," she said,
paul@Atherton.COM                  | "Both should be changed often."
{decwrl,pyramid,sun}!athertn!paul  | -- Bennett Falk in "Mom Meets Unix"