Anti-patterns for rule-based languages

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. This should be naturally reflected in software that provide pattern-based searches. We would like for example to specify that we search for white cars that are not station wagons, or that we search for a list of objects that does not contain two identical elements. In this paper we extend the notion of pattern to the one of anti-pattern, i.e. patterns that may contain complement symbols. This concept is appropriate to design powerful extensions to pattern-based programming languages like Ml, Asf+Sdf, Stratego, Maude, Elan or Tom and we show how this is used to extend the expressiveness and usability of the Tom language. We further define formally the semantics of anti-patterns both in the syntactic case, i.e. when the symbols have no specific theory associated, and modulo an arbitrary equational theory E. We then extend the classi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JSC
• Authors: Horatiu Cirstea, Claude Kirchner, Radu Kopetz, Pierre-Etienne Moreau
• Keywords: Anti-pattern, Arbitrary Equational Theory, Equational Theory, JSC 2010