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Generic Programming in Pharo

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Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT 2012)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 411))

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Abstract

Dynamically typed object-oriented languages have been left out of the scope of generic programming: in a dynamically typed setting, the need for generic programming has been less prominent since no restriction applies over the kind of elements a collection may contain. However, when creating an object, the class name is hardcoded in the program, and this makes the object instantiation process hard to abstract from.

In this paper, we describe our implementation of generic programming in Pharo, a Smalltalk dialect, showing how programmers can benefit from generic programming even in a dynamically typed language. Furthermore, we enhance the expressiveness of generic programming with reverse generics, a mechanism for automatically deriving new generic code starting from existing non-generic one.

As a case study, we show how we used generics and reverse generics in Pharo to reuse unit test cases and to identify a number of bugs and anomalies in the stream class hierarchy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pleiad Lab, Computer Science Department (DCC), University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Alexandre Bergel

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Italy

    Lorenzo Bettini

Authors
  1. Alexandre Bergel
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  2. Lorenzo Bettini
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Informatics, INSTICC / IPS, Rua do Vale de Chaves, Estefanilha, 2910-761, Setúbal, Portugal

    José Cordeiro

  2. Université d’Angers, France

    Slimane Hammoudi

  3. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Marten van Sinderen

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Bergel, A., Bettini, L. (2013). Generic Programming in Pharo. In: Cordeiro, J., Hammoudi, S., van Sinderen, M. (eds) Software and Data Technologies. ICSOFT 2012. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 411. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45404-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45404-2_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-45403-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-45404-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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