1 research outputs found
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