Import is not inheritance why we need both: Modules and classes

Szyperski, Clemens

doi:10.1007/bfb0053028

Cited by 42 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Furthermore, in object orientation, modularity has been historically confused with the notion of class: however, the class is a conceptual unit, not always the program unit of the size appropriate for compilation. A higher level notion such as modules has been advocated for long [Szypersky 1992;Bracha and Lindstrom 1992]. Java packages are not a good answer as they are mainly designed as name spaces: however, current discussions on the notion of sealing may be a forward step towards true modules [Biberstein et al 2001].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languages

Ducournau

2011

ACM Comput. Surv.

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In statically typed object-oriented languages, message sending, or late binding, is implemented with tables often called virtual functions tables (VFT). Those tables reduce method calls to function calls, with a small fixed number of extra indirections. The overhead is more or less important, whether inheritance and subtyping are single or multiple.In this paper, we survey the various implementation schemes available in separate compilation, in the three cases of single inheritance, multiple inheritance, and single inheritance but multiple subtyping, e.g. Java. Many works have been done recently in the framework of global compilation, mostly for dynamically typed languages but also applied to the Eiffel language in the Small Eiffel compiler. We examine how global compilation can improve the implementation and propose to use global techniques-coloring and type analysis-in a separate compilation framework.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing statically typed object-oriented programming languages

Ducournau

2011

ACM Comput. Surv.

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“…The former could penalize all usages of multiple inheritance, as long as classes are loaded one at a time. Therefore, the technique would gain from a notion of 'module'-long advocated in the object-oriented community [Szyperski, 1992 ;Ducournau et al, 2007]-allowing to load and color a set of classes as a whole. Moreover, an extra parameter is required for all method invocations and subtype checks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…interfaces, are in multiple subtyping. Furthermore, the absence of multiple subtyping was viewed as a deficiency of the Ada 95 revision, and this feature was incorporated in the next version [Taft et al, 2006]. This is a strong argument in favour of the importance of multiple inheritance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coloring, a versatile technique for implementing object‐oriented languages

Ducournau

2010

Softw Pract Exp

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Late binding and subtyping create run-time overhead for object-oriented languages. Dynamic typing and multiple inheritance create even more overhead. Static typing and single inheritance lead to two major invariants-of reference and position-that make the implementation as efficient as possible. Coloring is a technique that preserves these invariants for dynamic typing or multiple inheritance at minimal spatial cost.Coloring has been introduced and applied, more or less independently, to method invocation-under the name of selector coloring-to subtype tests under the name of pack encoding and to attribute access. This paper reviews a number of uses of coloring for optimizing object-oriented programming and generalizes them. It specifies several variations of coloring, such as bidirectional coloring and n-dimensional coloring. Coloring is NP-hard, so compilers that use it depend on heuristics. The paper describes some experimental results which indicate that bidirectional coloring gives the best results.

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“…Furthermore, inherited type overriding imposes additional run-time overhead on the implementation. It has been recognized [7], [13] that both modules and classes support necessary abstractions, which should be used as a complementary techniques.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%