Paper Info
Title
The Billion-Dollar Fix - Safe Modular Circular Initialisation with Placeholders and Placeholder Types.
Abstract
Programmers often need to initialise circular structures of objects. Initialisation should be safe (so that programs can never suffer null pointer exceptions or otherwise observe uninitialised values) and modular (so that each part of the circular structure can be written and compiled separately). Unfortunately, existing languages do not support modular circular initialisation: programmers in practical languages resort to Tony Hoare's "Billion Dollar Mistake": initialising variables with nulls, and then hoping to fix them up afterward. While recent research languages have offered some solutions, none fully support safe modular circular initialisation. We present placeholders, a straightforward extension to object-oriented languages that describes circular structures simply, directly, and modularly. In typed languages, placeholders can be described by placeholder types that ensure placeholders are used safely. We define an operational semantics for placeholders, a type system for placeholder types, and prove soundness. Incorporating placeholders into object-oriented languages should make programs simultaneously simpler to write, and easier to write correctly.
Year
Venue
Field
2013
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Pointer (computer programming),Operational semantics,Programming language,Mistake,Computer science,Modular design,Soundness,Liberian dollar
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
7920
0302-9743
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.57
10
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Servetto16111.51
Julian Mackay2131.73
Alex Potanin313318.60
James Noble41683163.52