Paper Info
Title
Object-oriented composition untangled
Abstract
Object-oriented languages come with pre-defined composition mechansims, such as inheritance, object composition, or delegation, each characterized by a certain set of composition properties, which do not themselves individually exist as abstractions at the language level. However, often non-standard composition semantics is needed, with a mixture of composition mechanisms. Such non-standard semantics are simulated by complicated architectures that are sensitive to requirement changes and cannot easily be adapted without invalidating existing clients. In this paper, we propose compound references, a new abstraction for object references, that allows us to provide explicit linguistic means for expressing and combining individual composition properties on-demand. The model is statically typed and allows the programmer to express a seamless spectrum of composition semantics in the interval between object composition and inheritance. The resulting programs are better understandable, due to explicity expressed design decisions, and less sensitive to requirement changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2001
10.1145/504282.504303
OOPSLA
Keywords
Field
DocType
security,object oriented language,spectrum,java,object oriented
Knowledge representation and reasoning,Programmer,Programming language,Abstraction,Object-oriented programming,Object composition,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Delegation,Semantics,Has-a
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
36
11
0362-1340
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-335-9
24
1.48
References 
Authors
11
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Klaus Ostermann182443.10
Mira Mezini23171211.04