Object-Oriented Composition Untangled

Object-oriented languages come with pre-defined composition mechanisms, such as inheritance, object composition, or delegation, each characterized by a certain set of composition properties, which do not themselves individually exist as abstractions at the language level. However, often non-standard composition semantics is needed, with a mixture of composition properties, which is not provided as such by any of the standard composition mechanisms. Such non-standard semantics are simulated by complicated architectures that are sensitive to requirement changes and cannot easily be adapted without invalidating existing clients. In this paper, we propose compound references, a new abstraction for object references, that allows us to provide explicit linguistic means for expressing and combining individual composition properties on-demand. The model is statically typed and allows the programmer to express a seamless spectrum of composition semantics in the interval between object composi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Klaus Ostermann, Mira Mezini
• Keywords: Composition Mechanisms, Composition Properties, Object Composition, OOPSLA 2001, Security Privacy