Paper Info
Title
Tribe: a simple virtual class calculus
Abstract
Beginning with BETA, a range of programming language mechanisms such as virtual classes (class-valued attributes of objects) have been developed to allow inheritance in the presence of mutually dependent classes. This paper presents Tribe, a type system which generalises and simplifies other formalisms of such mechanisms, by treating issues which are inessential for soundness, such as the precise details of dispatch and field initialisation, as orthogonal to the core formalism. Tribe can support path types dependent simultaneously on both classes and objects, which is useful for writing library code, and ubiquitous access to an object's family, which offers family polymorphism without the need to drag around family arguments. Languages based on Tribe will be both simpler and more expressive than existing designs, while having a simpler type system, serving as a useful basis for future language designs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1218563.1218578
Algorithmica
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
future language design,programming language mechanism,dependent class,path type,family argument,simple virtual class calculus,simpler type system,class-valued attribute,useful basis,type system,family polymorphism,subtyping
Conference
1-59593-615-7
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
22
0.89
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dave Clarke141626.19
Sophia Drossopoulou2101690.55
James Noble31683163.52
Tobias Wrigstad419422.95