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Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages

SBLP 2016: Programming Languages pp 1–15Cite as

Language Support for Generic Programming in Object-Oriented Languages: Peculiarities, Drawbacks, Ways of Improvement

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9889))

Abstract

Earlier comparative studies of language support for generic programming (GP) have shown that mainstream object-oriented (OO) languages such as C# and Java provide weaker support for GP as compared with functional languages such as Haskell or SML. But many new object-oriented languages have appeared in recent years. Have they improved the support for generic programming? And if not, is there a reason why OO languages yield to functional ones in this respect? In this paper we analyse language constructs for GP in seven modern object-oriented languages. We demonstrate that all of these languages follow the same approach to constraining type parameters, which has a number of inevitable problems. However, those problems are successfully lifted with the use of the another approach. Several language extensions that adopt this approach and allow to improve GP in OO languages are considered. We analyse the dependencies between different language features, discuss the features’ support using both approaches, and propose which approach is more expressive.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some details were omitted for simplicity. To make the code correct, one has to add \({\small \texttt {\#[derive(Debug,Copy,Clone)]}}\) before the \({\small \texttt {Point}}\) definition.

  2. 2.

    The “&” symbol means that an argument is passed by reference.

  3. 3.

    Some details were omitted for simplicity. The following declaration is to be provided to make the code correct: \({\small \texttt {\#[derive(Copy, Clone)]}}\) before the definition \({\small \texttt {struct Pair<S : Copy, T : Copy>}}\). Yet the type parameters of the \({\small \texttt {impl}}\) for pair must be constrained with \({\small \texttt {Copy+Equatable}}\).

  4. 4.

    Similarly to .NET, Kotlin supports extending classes with methods and properties, but interface implementation in extensions is not allowed.

  5. 5.

    The Concept design pattern can also be used, but it has its own drawbacks. We will discuss concept pattern later, in Sect. 2.2.

  6. 6.

    Scala is often blamed for its complex rules of implicits resolution: sometimes it is not clear which implicit object is to be used.

  7. 7.

    The default model can be generated automatically for a type if the type conforms to a concept, i. e. it provides methods required by the concept.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Artem Pelenitsyn, Jeremy Siek, and Ross Tate for helpful discussions on generic programming.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. I. I. Vorovich Institute of Mathematics, Mechanics and Computer Science, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia

    Julia Belyakova

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  1. Julia Belyakova
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Correspondence to Julia Belyakova .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

    Fernando Castor

  2. State University of New York, Binghamton, New York, USA

    Yu David Liu

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Belyakova, J. (2016). Language Support for Generic Programming in Object-Oriented Languages: Peculiarities, Drawbacks, Ways of Improvement. In: Castor, F., Liu, Y. (eds) Programming Languages. SBLP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9889. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45279-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45279-1_1

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