Article

Variant path types for scalable extensibility

Authors:

Atsushi Igarashi,

Mirko ViroliAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '07: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications

Pages 113 - 132

https://doi.org/10.1145/1297027.1297037

Published: 21 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Much recent work in the design of object-oriented programming languages has been focusing on identifying suitable features to support so-called scalable extensibility, where the usual extension mechanism by inheritance works in different scales of software components-that is, classes, groups of classes, groups of groups and so on. Its typing issues has usually been addressed by means of dependent type systems, where nested types are seen as properties of objects. In this work, we seek instead for a different solution, which can bemore easily applied to Java-like languages, in which nested types are considered properties of classe.

We introduce the mechanism of variant path types, which provide a flexible means to express intra-group relationship (among classes) that has to be preserved through extension. In particular, improving and extending existing works on groups and exact types, we feature the new notions of exact and inexact qualifications, providing rich abstractions to express various kinds of set of objects, with a flexible subtyping scheme. We formalize a safe type system for variant path types on top of Feather weight Java. Our development results in a complete solution for scalable extensibility, similarly to previous attempts based on dependent type systems.

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649836
Zhang YMyers A(2017)Familia: unifying interfaces, type classes, and family polymorphismProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338941:OOPSLA(1-31)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133894
Chiang FSitaramachandran S(2016)Unifying Data and Constraint RepairsJournal of Data and Information Quality10.1145/28836167:3(1-26)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2016
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Index Terms

Variant path types for scalable extensibility
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
      1. Semantics
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Classes and objects
        Polymorphism
      2. Language types
        Object oriented languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program constructs
      1. Object oriented constructs
      2. Type structures
    2. Program semantics

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cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '07: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications

October 2007

728 pages

ISBN:9781595937865

DOI:10.1145/1297027

General Chair:
Richard P. Gabriel
IBM Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
David F. Bacon
IBM Research, USA
,
Cristina Videira Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA
,
Guy L. Steele
Sun Labs, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 10
Proceedings of the 2007 OOPSLA conference
October 2007
686 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1297105
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 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 ACM 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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Published: 21 October 2007

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October 21 - 25, 2007

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OOPSLA '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 156 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

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Kravchuk-Kirilyuk AFeng GIskander JZhang YAmin N(2024)Persimmon: Nested Family Polymorphism with Extensible Variant TypesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498368:OOPSLA1(698-724)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649836
Zhang YMyers A(2017)Familia: unifying interfaces, type classes, and family polymorphismProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338941:OOPSLA(1-31)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133894
Chiang FSitaramachandran S(2016)Unifying Data and Constraint RepairsJournal of Data and Information Quality10.1145/28836167:3(1-26)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2883616
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Axelsen ESørensen FKrogdahl SMøller-Pedersen B(2012)Challenges in the design of the package template mechanismTransactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development IX10.5555/2434958.2434968(268-305)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
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