[Draft submitted for publication] Beyond Generics: Meta-Level Parameterization for Effective Generic Programming

Generic (polymorphic) type-safe containers are the primary motivation for generics (in Ada, Eiffel, and recently proposed additions to Java and C#) and templates (in C++). We studied buffer classes and found that they could not be unified by type parameters. At times, unification required non-type parameters (e.g., parameters representing operators, keywords or algorithmic details) and at other times – the nature of variations was not parametric which called for a more general unification mechanism. Investigation of the reasons behind the observed symptoms revealed that unification problems were caused by “feature combinations”: Other than by type, each class was also affected by yet other features and implementation of various features interacted with classes in rather chaoti