Re: 'canonical' library-set ?

Responding to problems...

> I think I read sometime ago that [perhaps unix/C] designed a set/s of
> library/s, intended to be a minimal but sufficient set to do 'any' task
?
> But that it is not widely accepted.
> 
> So eg. for strings, you might have:
> * return position of substring in string, else zero;
> ...
> * insert substring in string at position;
> ... etc.
> 
> I imagine programming then being mostly a matter of
> selecting procedures/function out of the library ?
> 
> So you've moved the problem to navigating the library ?
> 
> Which would be heirarchically arranged ?
> eg. > strings > insert > args-description .... ?

Yes -- if you are programming in a procedural or functional language 
this sort of functional decomposition was the basis of Structured 
Development and it is the most intuitive way to build complex modules 
from atomic functional elements like language operators or library 
functions.

> Perhaps java-programmers do this by 'browsing' the methods of classes ?

Not really. OO development uses a completely different paradigm for 
developing program structure. In fact, one can argue that the main goal 
of OO development is to avoid the hierarchical dependencies usually 
associated with functional decomposition. Instead, the OO paradigm 
creates software elements by direct abstraction of problem space 
entities and those elements collaborate on a peer-to-peer basis to solve 
the problem in hand. The browsers provided by the language IDEs are 
primarily a tool for navigating the program structure once it has been 
defined.


-- 
There is nothing wrong with me that could
not be cured by a capful of Drano.

H. S. Lahman
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