First-Class Relationships in an Object-Oriented Language

In this paper we investigate the addition of first-class relationships to a prototypical object-oriented programming language (a “middleweight” fragment of Java). We provide language-level constructs to declare relationships between classes and to manipulate relationship instances. We allow relationships to have attributes and provide a novel notion of relationship inheritance. We formalize our language giving both the type system and operational semantics and prove certain key safety properties.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Gavin M. Bierman, Alisdair Wren
• Keywords: ECOOP 2005, Language-level Constructs, Programming Languages, Prototypical Object-oriented Programming, first-class Relationships