TR-73: Designing Communities of Data Types

Abstract

With the increasing availability of object-oriented languages and processors, a small but growing community of users is slowly gaining experience with the object-oriented paradigm. With the realization that all programming is concemed with designing and implementing data types, there is a growing awareness that data type designing is far more difficult than traditional books on data stuctures and data types have suggested.
Designing data types in isolation is fundamentally diff’erent from designing them for integration into communities of data types. New approaches and methodologies are needed for handling the design of communities and sub-communities of data types. A modest beginning at uncovering and highlighting some of the issues is presented under the guise of designing a community of List data types.