Environmental acquisition revisited

In 1996, Gil and Lorenz proposed programming language constructs for specifying environmental acquisition in addition to inheritance acquisition for objects. They noticed that in many programs, objects are arranged in containment hierarchies and need to obtain information from their container objects. Therefore, if languages allowed programmers to specify such relationships directly, type systems and runtime environments could enforce the invariants that make these programming patterns work. In this paper, we present a formal version of environmental acquisition for class-based languages. Specifically, we introduce an extension of the ClassicJava model with constructs for environmental acquisition of fields and methods, a type system for the model, a reduction semantics, and a type soundness proof. We also discuss how to scale the model to a full-scale Java-like programming language. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Constructs

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Richard Cobbe, Matthias Felleisen
• Keywords: Environmental Acquisition, Languages Allowed Programmers, POPL 2005, Programming Languages, Type Soundness Proof