CDL—A COMPONENT DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE FOR REUSE

Abstract

CDL is a language for describing reusable software components. It facilitates the reuse of software components by providing a high-level model for component interfaces and mechanisms for describing the relationships between them. CDL extends the parameterisation mechanisms of modern high-level languages and helps to avoid the difficulties that can be encountered in specifying and instantiating generic components. CDL does this without explicit parameterisation or inheritance operators, and thus frees the designer from having to predict the reusability potential of the component. In these respects, CDL supports reuse at two levels. Components may inherit, generically instantiate or import other components. Furthermore, a CDL schema provides a design description that can itself be reused.