Generation gap (pattern)

Generation gap is a software design pattern documented by John Vlissides that treats automatically generated code differently than code that was written by a developer. Modifications should not be made to generated code, as they would be overwritten if the code generation process was ever re-run, such as during recompilation. Vlissides proposed creating a subclass of the generated code which contains the desired modification. This might be considered an example of the template method pattern.