Article

Free access

Multiple dispatch as dispatch on Tuples

Authors:

Gary T. Leavens,

Todd D. MillsteinAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '98: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications

Pages 374 - 387

https://doi.org/10.1145/286936.286977

Published: 01 October 1998 Publication History

Abstract

Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Smalltalk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet without multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the "visitor" pattern. We describe a new, simple, and orthogonal way to add multimethods to single-dispatch object-oriented languages, without affecting existing code. The new mechanism also clarifies many differences between single and multiple dispatch.

References

[1]

American National Standards Institute. Reference Manual for the Ada Programming Language. ANSI/MIL- STD ! 815A, February, 1983.

[2]

Roberto M. Amadio and L. Cardelli. Subtyping recursive types. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 15(4):575-631, 1993.

Digital Library

[3]

Ken Arnold and James Gosling. The Java Programming Language. Second Edition, Addison- Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1998.

Digital Library

[4]

Gerald Baumgartner, Konstantin L~iufer, Vincent E Russo. On the Interaction of Object- Oriented Design patterns and Programming Languages. Technical Report CSD-TR-96-020, Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, February 1996.

[5]

Daniel G. Bobrow, Kenneth Kahn, George Kiczales, Larry Masinter, Mark Stefik, and Frank Zdybel. CommonLoops: Merging Lisp and Object-Oriented Programming. In Norman Meyrowitz (editor), OOPSLA '86 Conference Proceedings, Portland, Oregon, September 1986, volume 21, number i1 of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pp. 17-29. ACM, New York, November, 1986.

Digital Library

[6]

Fran~:ois Bourdoncle and Stephan Merz. Type Checking Higher-Order Polymorphic Multi- Methods. Conference Record of POPL '97: The 24th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Paris, France, pp. 302-315. ACM, New York, January 1997.

Digital Library

[7]

John Boyland and Giuseppe Castagna. Parasitic Methods: An Implementation of Multi-Methods for Java. Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA '97). Volume 32, number i0 ofACM SIGPLAN Notices, pp. 66- 76. ACM, New York, November 1997.

Digital Library

[8]

Kim B. Bruce and Jon Crabtree and Thomas E Murtagh and Robert van Gent and Allyn Dimock and Robert Muller. Safe and decidable type checking in an object-oriented language. In Andreas Paepcke (editor), OOPSLA '93 Conference Proceedings. Volume 28, number 10 of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pp. 29-46. ACM, New York, October, 1993.

Digital Library

[9]

Kim Bruce, Luca Cardelli, Giuseppe Castagna, The Hopkins Object Group, Gary T. Leavens, and Benjamin Pierce. On Binary Methods. Theory and Practice of Object Systems, 1(3):221-242, 1995.

Digital Library

[10]

Luca Cardelli. A Semantics of Multiple inheritance. Information and Computation, 76(2/3):138- 164, February/March, 1988. An earlier version appeared in the 1984 Semantics of Data Types Symposium, LNCS 173, pp. 51-66, Springer-Verlag, 1984.

Digital Library

[11]

Giuseppe Castagna, Giorgio Ghelli, and Giuseppe Longo. A Calculus for Overloaded Functions with Subtyping. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, San Francisco, June, 1992, pp. 182-192, volume 5, number l of LISP Pointers. ACM, New York, January-March, 1992.

Digital Library

[12]

Giuseppe Castagna. Covariance and contravariance: conflict without a cause. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 17(3):431-447, 1995. See also {Chapter 5, Castagna 97}.

Digital Library

[13]

Giuseppe Castagna. Object-Oriented Programming A Unified Foundation. Birkh~iuser, Boston, 1997.

Digital Library

[14]

Craig Chambers. Object-Oriented Multi- Methods in Cecil. In O. Lehrmann-Madsen, editor, ECOOP '92 Conference Proceedings, Utrecht, the Netherlands, June~July, 1992, volume 615 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 33-56. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1992.

Digital Library

[15]

Craig Chambers. The Cecil Language: Specification and Rationale: Version 2.0. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, December, 1995. http:// w w w. cs. w ash i ngto n.ed u/researc h/proj e ct s/c ec il/w w w/ Papers/cecil-spec.html

[16]

Craig Chambers and Gary T. Leavens. Typechecking and Modules for Multi-Methods. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 17(6):805-843. November, 1995.

Digital Library

[17]

Craig Chambers and Gary T. Leavens. BeCeciI, A Core Object-Oriented Language with Block Structure and Multimethods: Semantics and Typing. Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, TR #96-17a, April 1997. ftp:// ftp.cs.iastate.edu/pub/techreports/TR96-17/TR.ps.Z; the appendix sections only are in ftp://ftp.cs.iastate.edu/pub/ techreports/TR96-17/appendix.ps.Z.

[18]

William Cook, Walter L. Hill, and Peter S. Canning. Inheritance is not Subtyping. In Conference Record of the Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, San Francisco, California, pp 125-135. ACM, New York, 1990.

Digital Library

[19]

William Cook. Object-Oriented Programming versus Abstract Data Types. In J.W. de Bakker, W.E de Roever, and G. Rozenberg, editors, Foundations of Object- Oriented Languages, REX School~Workshop Proceedings, Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, May~June, 1990, volume 489 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 151 - 178. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1991.

Digital Library

[20]

Michael D. Ernst, Craig Kaplan, and Craig Chambers. Predicate Dispatching: A Unified Theory of Dispatch. To appear in ECOOP '98, the 12th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Brussels, Belgium, July, 1998. Also http://www.cs.washington.edu/ research/pr~jects/cecil/www/www/Papers/gud'html"

Digital Library

[21]

Neal Feinberg, Sonya E. Keene, Robert O. Mathews, and E Tucker Withington. The Dylan Programming Book. Addison-Wesley Longman, Reading, Mass., 1997.

[22]

Erich Gamma and Richard Helm and Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison- Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1995.

Digital Library

[23]

Joseph A. Goguen and Jose Meseguer. Order-Sorted Algebra Solves the Constructor- Selector, Multiple Representation and Coercion Problems. In Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Ithaca, NY, pp. 18-29. IEEE Press, NY, June, 1987.

[24]

Adele Goldberg and David Robson. Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1983.

Digital Library

[25]

James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Guy L. Steele. The Java Language Specification. Addison- Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1996.

Digital Library

[26]

D. H. H. Ingalls. A Simple Technique for Handling Multiple Polymorphism. In Norman Meyrowitz, editor, OOPSLA '86 Conference Proceedings, Portland, Oregon, November, 1986, volume 21, number 11 of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pp. 347-349. ACM, New York, October, 1986.

Digital Library

[27]

Gregor Kiczales and Luis H. Rodriguez Jr. Efficient Method Dispatch in PCL. In

Digital Library

[28]

, Chapter 14.

[29]

Bertrand Meyer. Eiffel: The Language. Prentice Hall, New York, 1992.

Digital Library

[30]

Bertrand Meyer. Object-Oriented Software Construction. Second Edition, Prentice Hall, New York, 1997.

Digital Library

[31]

Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, and Robert Harper. The Definition of Standard ML. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

Digital Library

[32]

David A. Moon. Object-Oriented Programming with Flavors. In Norman Meyrowitz (editor), OOPSLA '86 Conference Proceedings, Portland, Oregon, September 1986, volume 21, number 11 of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pp. 1-8. ACM, New York, November, 1986.

Digital Library

[33]

Andreas Paepcke. Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective. MIT Press, 1993.

Digital Library

[34]

John C. Reynolds. Using Category Theory to Design implicit Conversions and Generic Operators. In Neil D. Jones (editor), Semantics-Directed Compiler Generation, Proceedings of a Workshop, Aarhus, Denmark, pp. 211-258. Volume 94 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, NY, 1980.

Digital Library

[35]

David A. Schmidt. The Structure of Typed Programming Languages. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994.

Digital Library

[36]

Andrew Shalit. The Dylan Reference Manual: The Definitive Guide to the New Object-Oriented Dynamic Language. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1997.

Digital Library

[37]

Guy L. Steele Jr. Common Lisp: The Language (second edition). Digital Press, Bedford, MA, 1990.

Digital Library

[38]

Bjarne Stroustrup. The C++ Programming Language: Third Edition. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1997.

Digital Library

Cited By

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
Wehr SThiemann P(2011)JavaGIACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/1985342.198534333:4(1-83)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1985342.1985343
Muschevici RPotanin ATempero ENoble J(2008)Multiple dispatch in practiceACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1449955.144980843:10(563-582)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1449955.1449808
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Multiple dispatch as dispatch on Tuples
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Object oriented languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory
  2. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program constructs
      1. Type structures

Recommendations

Multiple dispatch in practice

Multiple dispatch uses the run time types of more than one argument to a method call to determine which method body to run. While several languages over the last 20 years have provided multiple dispatch, most object-oriented languages still support only ...
Multiple dispatch in practice
OOPSLA '08: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications

Multiple dispatch uses the run time types of more than one argument to a method call to determine which method body to run. While several languages over the last 20 years have provided multiple dispatch, most object-oriented languages still support only ...
Multiple dispatch as dispatch on Tuples

Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Smalltalk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet without multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the "...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '98: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications

October 1998

428 pages

ISBN:1581130058

DOI:10.1145/286936

Chairmen:
Bjorn Freeman-Benson
Object Technology International, Victoria, B.C., Canada
,
Craig Chambers
Univ. of Washington, Seattle

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 33, Issue 10
Oct. 1998
412 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/286942
Chairmen:
Bjorn Freeman-Benson
Object Technology International, Victoria, B.C., Canada
,
Craig Chambers
Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1998 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]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 1998

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

OOPSLA98

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

OOPSLA98: Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications

October 18 - 22, 1998

British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Acceptance Rates

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

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

25
Total Citations
View Citations
680
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)93
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16

Reflects downloads up to 11 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

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
Wehr SThiemann P(2011)JavaGIACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/1985342.198534333:4(1-83)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1985342.1985343
Muschevici RPotanin ATempero ENoble J(2008)Multiple dispatch in practiceACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1449955.144980843:10(563-582)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1449955.1449808
Muschevici RPotanin ATempero ENoble JHarris GKiczales GRiehle DBlack A(2008)Multiple dispatch in practiceProceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications10.1145/1449764.1449808(563-582)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1449764.1449808
Bettini LCapecchi SVenneri BAmaral V(2007)Featherweight Java with multi-methodsProceedings of the 5th international symposium on Principles and practice of programming in Java10.1145/1294325.1294337(83-92)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1294325.1294337
Douglas TJohn DKerr S(2007)Making generic functions useable in SmalltalkProceedings of the 45th annual ACM Southeast Conference10.1145/1233341.1233349(36-41)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1233341.1233349
Kumar RAgrawal V(2007)Multiple dispatch in reflective runtime environmentComputer Languages, Systems and Structures10.1016/j.cl.2005.09.00133:2(60-78)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cl.2005.09.001
Clifton CMillstein TLeavens GChambers C(2006)MultiJavaACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/1133651.113365528:3(517-575)Online publication date: 1-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1133651.1133655
Foote BJohnson RNoble J(2005)Efficient multimethods in a single dispatch languageProceedings of the 19th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming10.1007/11531142_15(337-361)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11531142_15
Millstein TReay MChambers C(2003)Relaxed MultiJavaACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/949343.94932538:11(224-240)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/949343.949325
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents