A Type System for First-Class Layers with Inheritance, Subtyping, and Swapping

Context-Oriented Programming (COP) is a programming paradigm to encourage modularization of context-dependent software. Key features of COP are layers---modules to describe context-dependent behavioral variations of a software system---and their dynamic activation, which can modify the behavior of multiple objects that have already been instantiated. Typechecking programs written in a COP language is difficult because the activation of a layer can even change objects' interfaces. Inoue et al. have informally discussed how to make JCop, an extension of Java for COP by Appeltauer et al., type-safe. In this article, we formalize a small COP language called ContextFJ$_{<:}$ with its operational semantics and type system and show its type soundness. The language models main features of the type-safe version of JCop, including dynamically activated first-class layers, inheritance of layer definitions, layer subtyping, and layer swapping

Proceedings of the Resolve Workshop 2006

The aim of the RESOLVE Workshop 2006 was to bring together researchers and educators interested in: Refining formal approaches to software engineering, especially component-based systems, and introducing them into the classroom. The workshop served as a forum for participants to present and discuss recent advances, trends, and concerns in these areas, as well as formulate a common understanding of emerging research issues and possible solution paths

Programming language abstractions for extensible software components

With the growing demand for software systems that can cope with an increasing range of information processing tasks, the reuse of code from existing systems is essential to reduce the production costs of systems as well as the time to manufacture new software applications. For this reason, component-based software development techniques gain increasing attention in industry and research. Component technology is driven by the promise of building software by composing off-the-shelf components provided by a software component industry. Therefore, component technology emphasizes the independent development and deployment of components. Even though components look like perfect reusable assets, they embody general software solutions that need to be adapted to deploymentspecific needs and therefore cannot be deployed "as is" in general. Furthermore, as architectural building blocks, components are subject to continuous change. For these reasons, it is essential that components can easily be extended by both the component manufacturer to create new versions of components and by thirdparties that have to adapt components for use in specific software systems. Since in both cases concrete changes cannot be foreseen in general, mechanisms to integrate unanticipated extensions into components and component systems are required. While today many modern programming techniques, methodologies, and languages provide means that are well suited for creating static black-box components, the design and implementation of extensible components and extensible software systems often remains a challenge. In practice, extensibility is mostly achieved through ad-hoc techniques, like the disciplined use of design patterns and component frameworks, often in conjunction with meta-programming. The use of design patterns and component frameworks requires a rigorous coding discipline and often forces programmers to write tedious "boilerplate" code by hand, which makes this approach fragile and error-prone. Meta-programming techniques on the other hand are rather code-centric and mostly source code-based. Therefore, they are often not very suitable for today's component technology practice that stresses the binary reuse of black-box components. In this thesis I argue that technical difficulties in the development of extensible software components are due to the lack of appropriate programming language abstractions. To overcome the problems, concrete programming language mechanisms are proposed to facilitate the creation of extensible software. The proposed language features are strongly typed to help the programmer extend systems safely and consistently. The first part of the thesis illustrates the vision of truly extensible software components by proposing a simple theoretical model of first-class components built on top of a conventional class-based object-oriented language. This typed model includes a small set of primitives to dynamically build, compose, and extend software components safely, while supporting features like explicit context dependencies, late composition, unanticipated component extensibility, and strong encapsulation. The second part takes some ideas from the theoretical model and applies them in the design of the programming language Keris. Keris extends Java with an expressive module system featuring extensible modules. The main contributions are: A module system that combines the benefits of classical module systems for imperative languages with the advantages of modern component-oriented formalisms. In particular, modules are reusable, generic software components that can be linked with different cooperating modules without the need for resolving context dependencies by hand. A module composition scheme based on aggregation that makes the static architecture of a system explicit, and A type-safe mechanism for extending atomic modules aswell as fully linked systems statically by replacing selected subsystems with compatible versions without needing to re-link the full system. The extensibility mechanism is non-invasive; i.e. it preserves the original version and does not require access to source code. The overall design of the language was guided by the aim to develop a pragmatic, implementable, and conservative extension of Java which supports software development according to the open/closed principle: Systems written in Keris are closed in the sense that they can be executed, but they are open for unanticipated extensions that add, refine, or replace modules or whole subsystems. The last part of the thesis finally presents a case study which compares an extensible Java compiler implemented using mainstream object-oriented language features with one that was written in Keris. It shows how in practice, extensible modules can be used to develop extensible systems safely and efficiently

Proceedings of the RESOLVE Workshop 2002

Proceedings of the RESOLVE Workshop 200

State Controlled Object Oriented Programming

In this thesis, we examine an extension to the idea of object oriented programming to make programs easier for people and compilers to understand. Often objects behave differently depending on the history of past operations as well as their input that is their behavior depends on state. We may think of the fields of an object as encoding two kinds of information: data that makes up the useful information in the object and state that controls its behavior. Object oriented languages do not distinguish these two. We propose that by specifying these two, programs become clearer for people to write and understand and easier for machines to transform and optimize. We introduce the notion of state controlled object oriented programming, abbreviated as “SCOOP”, which encompasses explicit support of state in objects. While introducing an extension to object oriented programming, our objective is to minimize any burden on the programmer while programming with SCOOP. Static detection of the current state of an object by programming languages has been a challenge. To overcome this challenge without compromising our objective, a technique is presented that advances contemporary work. We propose an implementation scheme for a SCOOP compiler that effectively synchronizes the external and internal representation of state of objects. As an implication of this scheme, SCOOP would provide the memento design pattern by default. We also show how a portion of an object particular to its state can be replaced dynamically, allowing state dependent polymorphism. Further, we discuss how programs coded in SCOOP can be model checked

The modern landscape of managing effects for the working programmer

The management of side effects is a crucial aspect of modern programming, especially in concurrent and distributed systems. This thesis analyses different approaches for managing side effects in programming languages, specifically focusing on unrestricted side effects, monads, and algebraic effects and handlers. Unrestricted side effects, used in mainstream imperative programming languages, can make programs difficult to reason about. Monads offer a solution to this problem by describing side effects in a composable and referentially transparent way but many find them cumbersome to use. Algebraic effects and handlers can address some of the shortcomings of monads by providing a way to model effects in more modular and flexible way. The thesis discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches and compares them based on factors such as expressiveness, safety, and constraints they place on how programs must be implemented. The thesis focuses on ZIO, a Scala library for concurrent and asynchronous programming, which revolves around a ZIO monad with three type parameters. With those three parameters ZIO can encode the majority of practically useful effects in a single monad. ZIO takes inspiration from algebraic effects, combining them with monadic effects. The library provides a range of features, such as declarative concurrency, error handling, and resource management. The thesis presents examples of using ZIO to manage side effects in practical scenarios, highlighting its strengths over other approaches. The applicability of ZIO is evaluated by implementing a server side application using ZIO, and analyzing observations from the development process

Pure subtype systems: a type theory for extensible software

This thesis presents a novel approach to type theory called “pure subtype systems”, and a core calculus called DEEP which is based on that approach. DEEP is capable of modeling a number of interesting language techniques that have been proposed in the literature, including mixin modules, virtual classes, feature-oriented programming, and partial evaluation. The design of DEEP was motivated by two well-known problems: “the expression problem”, and “the tag elimination problem.” The expression problem is concerned with the design of an interpreter that is extensible, and requires an advanced module system. The tag elimination problem is concerned with the design of an interpreter that is efficient, and requires an advanced partial evaluator. We present a solution in DEEP that solves both problems simultaneously, which has never been done before. These two problems serve as an “acid test” for advanced type theories, because they make heavy demands on the static type system. Our solution in DEEP makes use of the following capabilities. (1) Virtual types are type definitions within a module that can be extended by clients of the module. (2) Type definitions may be mutually recursive. (3) Higher-order subtyping and bounded quantification are used to represent partial information about types. (4) Dependent types and singleton types provide increased type precision. The combination of recursive types, virtual types, dependent types, higher-order subtyping, and bounded quantification is highly non-trivial. We introduce “pure subtype systems” as a way of managing this complexity. Pure subtype systems eliminate the distinction between types and objects; every term can behave as either a type or an object depending on context. A subtype relation is defined over all terms, and subtyping, rather than typing, forms the basis of the theory. We show that higher-order subtyping is strong enough to completely subsume the traditional type relation, and we provide practical algorithms for type checking and for finding minimal types. The cost of using pure subtype systems lies in the complexity of the meta-theory. Unfortunately, we are unable to establish some basic meta-theoretic properties, such as type safety and transitivity elimination, although we have made some progress towards these goals. We formulate the subtype relation as an abstract reduction system, and we show that the type theory is sound if the reduction system is confluent. We can prove that reductions are locally confluent, but a proof of global confluence remains elusive. In summary, pure subtype systems represent a new and interesting approach to type theory. This thesis describes the basic properties of pure subtype systems, and provides concrete examples of how they can be applied. The Deep calculus demonstrates that our approach has a number of real-world practical applications in areas that have proved to be quite difficult for traditional type theories to handle. However, the ultimate soundness of the technique remains an open question

Scheme 2003: proceedings of the fourth workshop on scheme and functional programming

technical reportThis report contains the papers presented at the Fourth Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming. The purpose of the Scheme Workshop is to discuss experience with and future developments of the Scheme programming language?including the future of Scheme standardization?as well as general aspects of computer science loosely centered on the general theme of Scheme

Proceedings of Monterey Workshop 2001 Engineering Automation for Sofware Intensive System Integration

The 2001 Monterey Workshop on Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It is our pleasure to thank the workshop advisory and sponsors for their vision of a principled engineering solution for software and for their many-year tireless effort in supporting a series of workshops to bring everyone together.This workshop is the 8 in a series of International workshops. The workshop was held in Monterey Beach Hotel, Monterey, California during June 18-22, 2001. The general theme of the workshop has been to present and discuss research works that aims at increasing the practical impact of formal methods for software and systems engineering. The particular focus of this workshop was "Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration". Previous workshops have been focused on issues including, "Real-time & Concurrent Systems", "Software Merging and Slicing", "Software Evolution", "Software Architecture", "Requirements Targeting Software" and "Modeling Software System Structures in a fastly moving scenario".Office of Naval ResearchAir Force Office of Scientific Research Army Research OfficeDefense Advanced Research Projects AgencyApproved for public release, distribution unlimite