Author(s)

L. Liu & R. Ellis

Abstract

Despite the fact that the use of global variables has deleterious effects on the maintainability of programs, the topic of tackling global variables has appeared to have been overlooked in discussions of recent software maintenance issues. In this paper, we describe a method, developed in project Recoup[20] to replace global variable usage(characterised by the COMMON block facility in Fortran) by an object-based form, which supports data abstraction in a program. The converted program possesses improved modularity, comprehensibility and maintainability. 1 Introduction In recent discussions of software maintenance issues, topics have been fo- cused on the enhancement of the quality of an existing system with respect to the s

Keywords