Abstract: Inheritance and genericity are programming language features which provide a concise and intuitive syntax for defining operations in terms of operations. They are perhaps the most distinguishing features of “object-oriented” programming languages. Several object-oriented languages contain or are being extended to contain both inheritance and genericity, e.g., C++, Ada 9X, and Eiffel. [Meyer 88] simulates genericity using inheritance, and conjectures that “the answer to the question—can inheritance be simulated with genericity?—is no.” In this paper, we apply a fixed-point semantics of inheritance [Cook and Palsberg 89] to obtain a concise and provably correct simulation of inheritance using genericity. To demonstrate the practicality of the simulation, we use Ada generic packages to simulate Smalltalk inheritance.
Publication Year: 1993
Publication Date: 1993-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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