General Terms Design, Languages, Experimentation

Generic design aims at achieving non-redundancy for simplification reasons, by unifying similarity patterns at design and code levels, whenever there is an engineering benefit of doing so. The extent of non-accidental repetitions- recurring similar structures- in programs suggests that the potential of generic design may not be fully exploited. Poor design and ad hoc maintenance are the two often mentioned reasons why programmers multiply similar code structures (often termed as clones in literature). At times, cloning is done in a good cause, for example, to speed up development, increase program’s performance or improve its reliability. Still, much unresolved similarity remains in newly developed, well-designed programs. Often a symptom of failure to achieve genericity (therefore, term “weak generics”), such situations were of our prime interest in th