Re: Reserve Demobilization System Built Around Re

[jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>My Personal Opinion:  Calling a DBMS or GUI or math routine is NOT reuse. 
>Libraries of complex mathematical subroutines have been available to FORTRAN
>programmers since ENIAC, I suppose.

What is it, then? "use-again"? "repeated-use"? "use-more-than-once"? Sounds
like reuse to me...

>The term has mostly come to represent the ability to
>incorporate software written for or funded by "some other" project with little
>or no modification;

When one makes use of a DMBS or a GUI or a set of math routines, is this
not PRECISELY what you just described? Okay, I will concede one point: people
do seem to think that reuse spans projects. Fine--doesn't a DBMS span projects?
Over multiple project lifetimes, mechanisms that keep coming up (that "haven't
we built this already?" feeling of deja vu) eventually get turned into highly
reusable componentry--such as a DBMS, a GUI, or a set of math routines did at
some point in the distant (or not so distant) past. The
only possible distinction I can see between this and the rather loose notion
people seem to have of reuse is that when one reuses a DBMS/GUI/math routine
one is reusing some software component that has become common currency. Perhaps
people think of reuse as being the repeated use of some kind of software that
has yet to become common currency? In that case, the only clear distinction
is one of TIME.
-- 
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