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Workshop/School/Symposium of the REX Project (Research and Education in Concurrent Systems)

REX 1990: Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages pp 60–90Cite as

Designing an object-oriented programming language with behavioural subtyping

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 489))

Abstract

This paper describes the design of the parallel object-oriented programming language POOL-I. We concentrate on the type system of the language and specifically on the aspects of subtyping and genericity. POOL-I is the first language we know of that includes subtyping and inheritance as completely separate language mechanisms. By decoupling these two, which have been strongly tied together in other statically typed object-oriented languages with inheritance, a much cleaner language design can be obtained and a much more flexible use of both mechanisms can be made in actual programs.

In POOL-I subtyping is based only on the externally observable behaviour of objects. This includes not only their signature (the names of available methods and their parameter and result types) but also more detailed information about this behaviour. We also present a preliminary formalism in which these properties can be specified. Finally we introduce the more advanced features of the POOL-I type system, such as bounded genericity and dynamic type manipulation.

The work described in this paper was done in the context of ESPRIT Basic Research Action 3020, Integration.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philips Research Laboratories, P.O. Box 80.000, 5600 JA, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Pierre America

Authors
  1. Pierre America
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Editor information

J. W. de Bakker W. P. de Roever G. Rozenberg

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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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America, P. (1991). Designing an object-oriented programming language with behavioural subtyping. In: de Bakker, J.W., de Roever, W.P., Rozenberg, G. (eds) Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages. REX 1990. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 489. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019440

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019440

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-53931-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46450-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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