research-article

Semantic subtyping for imperative object-oriented languages

Authors:

Andrea CorradiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 51, Issue 10

Pages 568 - 587

https://doi.org/10.1145/3022671.2983992

Published: 19 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Semantic subtyping is an approach for defining sound and complete procedures to decide subtyping for expressive types, including union and intersection types; although it has been exploited especially in functional languages for XML based programming, recently it has been partially investigated in the context of object-oriented languages, and a sound and complete subtyping algorithm has been proposed for record types, but restricted to immutable fields, with union and recursive types interpreted coinductively to support cyclic objects. In this work we address the problem of studying semantic subtyping for imperative object-oriented languages, where fields can be mutable; in particular, we add read/write field annotations to record types, and, besides union, we consider intersection types as well, while maintaining coinductive interpretation of recursive types. In this way, we get a richer notion of type with a flexible subtyping relation, able to express a variety of type invariants useful for enforcing static guarantees for mutable objects. The addition of these features radically changes the defi- nition of subtyping, and, hence, the corresponding decision procedure, and surprisingly invalidates some subtyping laws that hold in the functional setting. We propose an intuitive model where mutable record val- ues contain type information to specify the values that can be correctly stored in fields. Such a model, and the correspond- ing subtyping rules, require particular care to avoid circularity between coinductive judgments and their negations which, by duality, have to be interpreted inductively. A sound and complete subtyping algorithm is provided, together with a prototype implementation.

Supplementary Material

Auxiliary Archive (p568-ancona-s.zip)

The archive contains a directory with the Prolog implementation of the subtyping algorithm and the image of a virtual machine that can be used to run it.

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Cited By

Ke WChan K(2021)A Subtyping Scheme for Nominal and Structural Types Based on Class Graph EquivalenceProceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Blockchain Technology and Applications10.1145/3510487.3510509(151-157)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510487.3510509
Ancona DFerrando AMascardi V(2020)Can determinism and compositionality coexist in RML?Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.322.4322(13-32)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2020
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.322.4
Usov ADardha O(2020)SFJ: An Implementation of Semantic Featherweight JavaCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-030-50029-0_10(153-168)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50029-0_10
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Semantic subtyping for imperative object-oriented languages
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
2. Theory of computation

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 51, Issue 10

OOPSLA '16

October 2016

915 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/3022671

Editor:
Matthew Fluet

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
October 2016
915 pages
ISBN:9781450344449
DOI:10.1145/2983990
General Chair:
Eelco Visser
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Program Chair:
Yannis Smaragdakis
University of Athens, Greece

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 October 2016

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 51, Issue 10

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Cited By

Ke WChan K(2021)A Subtyping Scheme for Nominal and Structural Types Based on Class Graph EquivalenceProceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Blockchain Technology and Applications10.1145/3510487.3510509(151-157)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510487.3510509
Ancona DFerrando AMascardi V(2020)Can determinism and compositionality coexist in RML?Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.322.4322(13-32)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2020
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.322.4
Usov ADardha O(2020)SFJ: An Implementation of Semantic Featherweight JavaCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-030-50029-0_10(153-168)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50029-0_10
Belyakova JMurray TErnst G(2019)Decidable tag-based semantic subtyping for nominal types, tuples, and unionsProceedings of the 21st Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs10.1145/3340672.3341115(1-11)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3340672.3341115
Muehlboeck FTate R(2018)Empowering union and intersection types with integrated subtypingProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/32764822:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3276482
Ancona D(2017)Proceedings of the First Workshop on Coalgebra, Horn Clause Logic Programming and TypesElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.258.6258(70-71)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.258.6
Franceschini LAncona DKomendantskaya E(2017)Structural Resolution for Abstract Compilation of Object-Oriented LanguagesElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.258.2258(19-35)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.258.2
Chaudhuri AVekris PGoldman SRoch MLevi G(2017)Fast and precise type checking for JavaScriptProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338721:OOPSLA(1-30)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133872

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