[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
206 Egan  Hall, Northeastern University
    (building 60 on http://www.campusmap.neu.edu/)  
1145-145. Bring your lunch.

Richard C. Cobbe

Northeastern University

will present

"Environmental Acquisition---A New Inheritance-Like Abstraction Mechanism"
by Joseph Gil and David Lorenz.  (OOPSLA '96)

Abstract:

The class of an object is not necessarily the only determiner of its
runtime behavior.  Often it is necessary to have an object behave
differently depending on the other objects to which it is connected.
However, as it currently stands, object-oriented programming
provides no support for this concept, and little recognition of its
role in common, practical programming situations.  This paper
investigates a new programming paradigm, environmental acquisition
in the context of object aggregation, in which objects acquire
behaviour from their current containers at runtime.  The key idea is
that the behavior of its component may depend on its enclosing
composite(s).  In particular, we propose a form of feature sharing
in which an object "inherits" features from the classes of objects
in its environment.  By examining the declaration of classes, it is
possible to determine which kinds of classes may contain a
component, and which components must be contained in a given kind of
composite.  These relationships are the basis for language
constructs that [support] acquisition.  We develop the theory of
acquisition that includes topics such as the kinds of links along
which acquisition may occur, and the behaviour of routine (methods)
and attribute features under acquisition.  The proposed model for
acquisition as a hierarchical abstraction mechanism is a strongly
typed model that allows static type checking of programs exploiting
this mechanism.  We compare it to several other mechanisms including
inheritance and delegation, and show that it is significantly
different than these.

Upcoming Events:

11/12: Theo Skotoniotis

11/19: Dale Vaillancourt: Separation Logic

12/2: Greg Pettyjohn: Cocoon

12/9: Phillipe Meunier

--Mitch