research-article

Polymorphic identifiers: uniform resource access in objective-smalltalk

Authors:

Marcel Weiher and

Robert HirschfeldAuthors Info & Claims

DLS '13: Proceedings of the 9th symposium on Dynamic languages

October 2013

Pages 61 - 72

https://doi.org/10.1145/2508168.2508169

Published: 28 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In object-oriented programming, polymorphic dispatch of operations decouples clients from specific providers of services and allows implementations to be modified or substituted without affecting clients.

The Uniform Access Principle (UAP) tries to extend these qualities to resource access by demanding that access to state be indistinguishable from access to operations. Despite language features supporting the UAP, the overall goal of substitutability has not been achieved for either alternative resources such as keyed storage, files or web pages, or for alternate access mechanisms: specific kinds of resources are bound to specific access mechanisms and vice versa. Changing storage or access patterns either requires changes to both clients and service providers and trying to maintain the UAP imposes significant penalties in terms of code-duplication and/or performance overhead.

We propose introducing first class identifiers as polymorphic names for storage locations to solve these problems. With these Polymorphic Identifiers, we show that we can provide uniform access to a wide variety of resource types as well as storage and access mechanisms, whether parametrized or direct, without affecting client code, without causing code duplication or significant performance penalties.

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Cited By

Weiher MAguiar AChiba SBoix E(2020)Can programmers escape the gentle tyranny of call/return?Companion Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3397537.3397546(163-172)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397537.3397546
Kell SAguiar AChiba SBoix E(2020)Convivial design heuristics for software systemsCompanion Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3397537.3397543(144-148)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397537.3397543
Weiher MHirschfeld RMasuhara HPetricek T(2019)Storage combinatorsProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3359591.3359729(111-127)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359591.3359729
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Index Terms

Polymorphic identifiers: uniform resource access in objective-smalltalk
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Dynamic compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Polymorphism
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Communications management
        Input / output
        Memory management

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cover image ACM Conferences

DLS '13: Proceedings of the 9th symposium on Dynamic languages

October 2013

118 pages

ISBN:9781450324335

DOI:10.1145/2508168

Co-chair:
Antony Hosking
Purdue University, USA
,
General Chair:
Patrick Eugster
Purdue University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Carl Friedrich Bolz
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 49, Issue 2
DLS '13
February 2014
105 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2578856
Editor:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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Published: 28 October 2013

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SPLASH '13: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 28, 2013

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DLS '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 22 submissions, 41%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 77 submissions, 42%

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Cited By

Weiher MAguiar AChiba SBoix E(2020)Can programmers escape the gentle tyranny of call/return?Companion Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3397537.3397546(163-172)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397537.3397546
Kell SAguiar AChiba SBoix E(2020)Convivial design heuristics for software systemsCompanion Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3397537.3397543(144-148)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3397537.3397543
Weiher MHirschfeld RMasuhara HPetricek T(2019)Storage combinatorsProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3359591.3359729(111-127)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359591.3359729
Weiher MHirschfeld RFuentes LBatory DCzarnecki K(2016)Constraints as polymorphic connectorsProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Modularity10.1145/2889443.2889456(134-145)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2889443.2889456

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