Anti-pattern Matching

Negation is intrinsic to human thinking and most of the time when searching for something, we base our patterns on both positive and negative conditions. In a previous work, we have extended the notion of term to the one of anti-term that may contain complement symbols. Matching such anti-terms against terms has the nice property of being unitary. Here we generalize the syntactic anti-pattern matching to anti-pattern matching modulo an arbitrary equational theory E, and we study the specific and practically very useful case of associativity, possibly with a unity (AU). To this end, based on the syntacticness of associativity, we present a rule-based associative matching algorithm, and we extend it to AU. This algorithm is then used to solve AU anti-pattern matching problems. This allows us to be generic enough so that for instance, the AllDiff standard predicate of constraint programming becomes simply expressible in this framework. AU anti-patterns are implemented in the Tom languag...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ESOP
• Authors: Claude Kirchner, Radu Kopetz, Pierre-Etienne Moreau
• Keywords: Anti-pattern Matching, Anti-pattern Matching Modulo, ESOP 2007, Programming Languages, Syntactic Anti-pattern Matching