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Assuring convergence

The problems of constructing convergent scripts have already been discussed in [9,10]. One approach to ensuring awareness and convergence is to create an intelligent interface for dealing with the environment[7]. This interface hides the details of convergence from the script writer by checking for each change before making it inside of subroutines that accomplish the changes. As long as one interacts only with the environment through the lens of these subroutines, the script is guaranteed to be convergent. Without this discipline, convergent scripts are more complex than their non-convergent counterparts. Checking every parameter before changing it leads to doubling of script size with a commensurate increase in the difficulty and cost of script maintainability.



Alva L. Couch
2001-10-02