EDITORIAL POINTERS.

This article focuses on the main topics appearing in the May 1994 issue of the periodical "Communications of the ACM." The blueprint for this issue is reverse engineering or how technology investment can grow, bend or respond to changing business requirements. It is not about buying new software components, it is about understanding existing components and remolding them to fit new demands. The writers in this issue present some valuable reverse engineering experiences in business and government applications for legacy codes, information systems, inventories, relational databases and payroll systems, among others. Also of note is Robert Arnold's "Viewpoint," tracing the early origins of software reengineering technology to present day practices and future expectations. Adaptive programming, realized by the use of propagation patterns, lifts programming to a higher level of abstraction. Adaptive object-oriented programming is introduced as an extension to conventional methods. This work is a step en route to the development of a better programming language.