Objects revisited

Abstract

The authors provide insights into the process of deriving objects from code and specifications. Their purpose is to facilitate the more general process of reverse engineering. They concentrate on a method for object identification and give some examples of deriving objects with details on the syntax of the object-oriented notation Z++. The authors provide some further examples of object derivation, concentrating on internal data structures in program code. They detail the relationship between objects and abstract data types, and discuss the concepts of reusability with respect to inheritance hierarchies.<>