Article

Declaring and checking non-null types in an object-oriented language

Authors:

Manuel Fähndrich,

K. Rustan M. LeinoAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '03: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programing, systems, languages, and applications

Pages 302 - 312

https://doi.org/10.1145/949305.949332

Published: 26 October 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Distinguishing non-null references from possibly-null references at the type level can detect null-related errors in object-oriented programs at compile-time. This paper gives a proposal for retrofitting a language such as C# or Java with non-null types. It addresses the central complications that arise in constructors, where declared non-null fields may not yet have been initialized, but the partially constructed object is already accessible. The paper reports experience with an implementation for annotating and checking null-related properties in C# programs.

References

[1]

Robert DeLine and Manuel Fähndrich. Enforcing high-level protocols in low-level software. In Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), volume 36, number 5 in SIGPLAN Notices, pages 59--69. ACM, May 2001.]]

Digital Library

[2]

ECMA. Standard ECMA-334: C# Language Specification, December 2002. Available on the web as http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ecma-st/Ecma-334.pdf.]]

[3]

David Evans, John Guttag, James Horning, and Yang~Meng Tan. LCLint: A tool for using specifications to check code. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT '94 Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 87--96, 1994.]]

Digital Library

[4]

Manuel Fähndrich and K. Rustan M. Leino. Heap monotonic typestates. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership, July 2003.]]

[5]

Kathleen Fisher and John H. Reppy. The design of a class mechanism for Moby. In Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), volume~34, number~5 in SIGPLAN Notices, pages 37--49. ACM, May 1999.]]

Digital Library

[6]

Robert Fitzgerald, Todd B. Knoblock, Erik Ruf, Bjarne Steensgaard, and David Tarditi. Marmot: An optimizing compiler for Java. Software-Practice and Experience, 30(3), 2000.]]

Digital Library

[7]

Cormac Flanagan, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Stephanie Weirich, and Matthias Felleisen. Catching bugs in the web of program invariants. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '96 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), volume 31, number 5 in SIGPLAN Notices, pages 23--32. ACM, May 1996.]]

Digital Library

[8]

Cormac Flanagan, K. Rustan M. Leino, Mark Lillibridge, Greg Nelson, James B. Saxe, and Raymie Stata. Extended static checking for Java. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), volume 37, number 5 in SIGPLAN Notices, pages 234--245. ACM, May 2002.]]

Digital Library

[9]

James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele. The Java\raisebox.6ex tm Language Specification. Addison-Wesley, 1996.]]

Digital Library

[10]

Trevor Jim, Greg Morrisett, Dan Grossman, Michael Hicks, James Cheney, and Yanling Wang. Cyclone: A safe dialect of C. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track, pages 275--288, June 2002.]]

Digital Library

[11]

Barbara Liskov, Dorothy Curtis, Mark Day, Sanjay Ghemawat, Robert Gruber, Paul Johnson, and Andrew C. Myers. Theta reference manual, preliminary version. Memo~88, Programming Methodology Group, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, February 1995. Available on the web at http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/Theta.html.]]

[12]

Barbara Liskov and John Guttag. Abstraction and Specification in Program Development. MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Series. MIT Press, 1986.]]

Digital Library

[13]

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

Digital Library

[14]

Greg Morrisett, David Walker, Karl Crary, and Neal Glew. From system F to typed assembly language. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 21(3):527--568, 1999.]]

Digital Library

[15]

George C. Necula, Scott McPeak, and Westley Weimer. CCured: Type-safe retrofitting of legacy code. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 128--139, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[16]

Simon Peyton Jones, John Hughes, Lennart Augustsson, Dave Barton, Brian Boutel, Warren Burton, Joseph Fasel, Kevin Hammond, Ralf Hinze, Paul Hudak, Thomas Johnsson, Mark Jones, John Launchbury, Erik Meijer, John Peterson, Alastair Reid, Colin Runciman, and Philip Wadler. Haskell 98 report, February 1999. Available on the web as http://haskell.org/onlinereport.]]

[17]

Chris Smith. Java pointifications: Nullability constraints, June 2001. Available on the web as http://cdsmith.twu.net/professional/java/pontifications/nonnull.html.]]

[18]

Frederick Smith, David Walker, and Greg Morrisett. Alias types. In Proceedings of the 14th European Symposium on Programming, volume 1782 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 366--381. Springer, March 2000.]]

Digital Library

[19]

Raymie Stata. Improving the safety of Java, December 1995. Available on the web as http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/\homedirraymie/Java/javachangessafety.html.]]

Cited By

Tang WDong DLi SWang CYao PZhou JZhang C(2024) Octopus: Scaling Value-Flow Analysis via Parallel Collection of Realizable Path ConditionsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363274333:3(1-33)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632743
Marron MStorm THirschfeld R(2023)Toward Programming Languages for Reasoning: Humans, Symbolic Systems, and AI AgentsProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3622758.3622895(136-152)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622758.3622895
Gamboa CCanelas PTimperley CFonseca A(2023)Usability-Oriented Design of Liquid Types for Java2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00132(1520-1532)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00132
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Practical pluggable types for java
ISSTA '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on Software testing and analysis

This paper introduces the Checker Framework, which supports adding pluggable type systems to the Java language in a backward-compatible way. A type system designer defines type qualifiers and their semantics, and a compiler plug-in enforces the ...
Declaring and checking non-null types in an object-oriented language
Special Issue: Proceedings of the OOPSLA '03 conference

Distinguishing non-null references from possibly-null references at the type level can detect null-related errors in object-oriented programs at compile-time. This paper gives a proposal for retrofitting a language such as C# or Java with non-null ...
A Domain-Theoretic Model Of Nominally-Typed Object-Oriented Programming

The majority of contemporary mainstream object-oriented (OO) software is written using nominally-typed OO programming languages. Extant domain-theoretic models of OOP developed to analyze OO type systems miss crucial features of these mainstream OO ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '03: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programing, systems, languages, and applications

October 2003

430 pages

ISBN:1581137125

DOI:10.1145/949305

Conference Chair:
Ron Crocker
Motorola, Inc.
,
Program Chair:
Guy L. Steele
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 38, Issue 11
Special Issue: Proceedings of the OOPSLA '03 conference
November 2003
417 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/949343
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2003 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

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 October 2003

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

OOPSLA03

Sponsor:

OOPSLA03: ACM SIGPLAN Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications Conference

October 26 - 30, 2003

California, Anaheim, USA

Acceptance Rates

OOPSLA '03 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 147 submissions, 18%;

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

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

145
Total Citations
View Citations
932
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)10
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 11 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Tang WDong DLi SWang CYao PZhou JZhang C(2024) Octopus: Scaling Value-Flow Analysis via Parallel Collection of Realizable Path ConditionsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363274333:3(1-33)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632743
Marron MStorm THirschfeld R(2023)Toward Programming Languages for Reasoning: Humans, Symbolic Systems, and AI AgentsProceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3622758.3622895(136-152)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622758.3622895
Gamboa CCanelas PTimperley CFonseca A(2023)Usability-Oriented Design of Liquid Types for Java2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00132(1520-1532)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00132
Sun KChen SWang MHao D(2023)What Types Are Needed for Typing Dynamic Objects? A Python-Based Empirical StudyProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-981-99-8311-7_2(24-45)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8311-7_2
Madsen MScholliers CSinger J(2022)The Principles of the Flix Programming LanguageProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3563835.3567661(112-127)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563835.3567661
Blaudeau CLiu F(2022)A conceptual framework for safe object initialization: a principled and mechanized soundness proof of the Celsius modelProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633146:OOPSLA2(729-757)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563314
Bierhoff K(2022)Wildcards need witness protectionProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633016:OOPSLA2(373-394)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563301
Steimann F(2022)Containerless Plurals: Separating Number from Type in Object-Oriented ProgrammingACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/352763544:4(1-56)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3527635
Liu FLhoták OBiboudis AGiarrusso POdersky M(2020)A type-and-effect system for object initializationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282434:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428243
Lam PDietrich JPearce DKell SVerna D(2020)Putting the semantics into semantic versioningProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3426428.3426922(157-179)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3426428.3426922
Show More Cited By

View Options

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

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents