> "David R. Musser, and Alexander A. Stepanov: Tecton: A Language for Manipulating Generic Objects. In Program Specification, Proceedings of a Workshop, Aarhus,

> "David R. Musser, and Alexander A. Stepanov: Tecton: A Language for Manipulating Generic Objects. In Program Specification, Proceedings of a Workshop, Aarhus, Denmark, August 1981" The concept of "generic object" introduced in this paper is quite different from today's: In the proposed framework, a series of refinements constitute a set of design decisions leading to a program. It should be possible to backtrack to any stage of decision making and explore an alternate path of refinements. Different design decisions can thus be compared and evaluated. A notion that seems to be particularly useful for achieving this kind of organization is that of "generic objects." A generic object is a notion for grouping objects sharing common syntactic structure and semantic properties. Informally, a generic object describes a whole class of non-isomorphic possibilities, unless a stage has been reached at which the described objects are fully defined. Adding properties to a generic object makes it more specific by narrowing the range of possibilities. Once we allow such genericity of objects, the way is open also to the development and use of "generic algorithms," which offer a way of organizing and extending our knowledge of algorithms and control. We have begun developing a language called 'Tecton" (Greek for "builder") for constructing generic objects and algorithms.[1] What is called a "generic object" here is what today would rather be called a "base class" of a type hierarchy. [1] Page 402 in http://stepanovpapers.com/Tecton.pdf http://stepanovpapers.com/Tecton.pdf