Work on corpus tools in EAGLES has been jointly developed with the LRE MULTEXT project and is presented in two documents, one discussing the reusability of linguistic software (EAGLES, 1996h), the other giving guidelines for linguistic software development (EAGLES, 1996b).
In the first document, benefits derived from the standardisation of linguistic software are presented in the first place. A discussion of the main aspects involved in software reusability leads to the establishment of the general principles for the definition of a coherent environment for the development of linguistic software. This environment is presented in the second document. In its present version, principles and guidelines are summarised, and certain parts of the environment are already developed: character sets, representation of textual data and of the linguistic annotation, programming in C and consistency in the command line interface.