Black-box composition of mismatched software components

Software is expensive to develop. Much of that expense can be blamed on difficulties in combining, integrating or re-using separate pieces of software, and in maintaining such compositions. Conventional development tools approach composition in an inherently narrow way. Specifically, they insist on modules that are plug-compatible, meaning that they must fit together down to a very fine level of detail, and that are homogeneous, meaning that they must be written according to the same conventions and (usually) in the same programming language. In summary, modules must have matched interfaces to compose. These inflexibilities, in turn, motivate more software creation and concomitant expense: they make programming approaches based on integration and re-use unduly expensive. This means that reimplementation from scratch is often chosen in preference to adaptation of existing implementations. This dissertation presents several contributions towards lessening this problem. It centres on the design of a new special-purpose programming language, called Cake. This language is specialised to the task of describing how components having mismatched in-terfaces (i.e. not plug-compatible, and perhaps not homogeneous) may be adapted s