Towards a new model of abstraction in software engineering

Existing abstraction techniques lead to implementations which overly constrain their users. This happens because these techniques force the implementor to make all the decisions about how to implement the abstraction including some which would better be made by the user. The author has developed a new model of abstraction, which he calls the two-view approach; the first view is the traditional one, it provides the functionality of the abstraction, the second view allows the user to participate in some implementation decisions. This approach promises to be general enough to handle a wide range of applications