Using a Prolog Prototype for Designing an Object Oriented Scheme

Christine Solnon, Michel Rueher

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to define a reverse engineering technique for recovering structural design information through the analysis of a Prolog prototype. Prolog is widely used for making prototypes due to its high level of abstraction, and object oriented programming has emerged as a successful paradigm for software development. However, object oriented modelling is difficult to achieve. Thus, we propose to extract an object oriented scheme from the Prolog prototype. We show that the identification of the inclusion polymorphism expressed by Prolog clauses allows us to define an inheritance hierarchy.