Why Nominal-Typing Matters in OOP

The statements `inheritance is not subtyping' and `mainstream OO languages unnecessarily place restrictions over inheritance' have rippled as mantras through the PL research community for years. Many mainstream OO developers and OO language designers however do not accept these statements. In \emph{nominally-typed} OO languages that these developers and language designers are dearly familiar with, inheritance simply is subtyping; and they believe OO type inheritance is an inherently nominal notion not a structural one. Nominally-typed OO languages are among the most used programming languages today. However, the value of nominal typing to mainstream OO developers, as a means for designing robust OO software, seems to be in wait for full appreciation among PL researchers--thereby perpetuating an unnecessary schism between many OO developers and language designers and many OO PL researchers, with each side discounting, if not even disregarding, the views of the other. In this essay we strengthen earlier efforts to demonstrate the semantic value of nominal typing by presenting a technical comparison between nominal OO type systems and structural OO type systems. Recently, a domain-theoretic model of nominally-typed OOP was compared to well-known models of structurally-typed OOP. Combined, these comparisons provide a clear and deep account for the relation between nominal and structural OO type systems that has not been presented before, and they help demonstrate the key value of nominal typing and nominal subtyping to OO developers and language designers. We believe a clearer understanding of the key semantic advantage of pure nominal OO typing over pure structural OO typing can help remedy the existing schism. We believe future foundational OO PL research, to further its relevance to mainstream OOP, should be based less on structural models of OOP and more on nominal ones instead.Comment: 19 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1603.0864

An Overview of Nominal-Typing versus Structural-Typing in OOP

NOOP is a mathematical model of nominally-typed OOP that proves the identification of inheritance and subtyping in mainstream nominally-typed OO programming languages and the validity of this identification. This report gives an overview of the main notions in OOP relevant to constructing a mathematical model of OOP such as NOOP. The emphasis in this report is on defining nominality, nominal typing and nominal subtyping of mainstream nominally-typed OO languages, and on contrasting the three notions with their counterparts in structurally-typed OO languages, i.e., with structurality, structural typing and structural subtyping, respectively. An additional appendix demonstrates these notions and other related notions, and the differences between them, using some simple code examples. A detailed, more technical comparison between nominal typing and structural typing in OOP is presented in other publications.Comment: 16 page

A Comparison of NOOP to Structural Domain-Theoretic Models of OOP

Mainstream object-oriented programming languages such as Java, C#, C++ and Scala are all almost entirely nominally-typed. NOOP is a recently developed domain-theoretic model of OOP that was designed to include full nominal information found in nominally-typed OOP. This paper compares NOOP to the most widely known domain-theoretic models of OOP, namely, the models developed by Cardelli and Cook, which were structurally-typed models. Leveraging the development of NOOP, the comparison presented in this paper provides a clear and precise mathematical account for the relation between nominal and structural OO type systems.Comment: 17 page

Subtyping in Java is a Fractal

While developing their software, professional object-oriented (OO) software developers keep in their minds an image of the subtyping relation between types in their software. The goal of this paper is to present an observation about the graph of the subtyping relation in Java, namely the observation that, after the addition of generics---and of wildcards, in particular---to Java, the graph of the subtyping relation is no longer a simple directed-acyclic graph (DAG), as in pre-generics Java, but is rather a fractal. Further, this observation equally applies to other mainstream nominally-typed OO languages (such as C#, C++ and Scala) where generics and wildcards (or some other form of 'variance annotations') are standard features. Accordingly, the shape of the subtyping relation in these OO languages is more complex than a tree or a simple DAG, and indeed is also a fractal. Given the popularity of fractals, the fractal observation may help OO software developers keep a useful and intuitive mental image of their software's subtyping relation, even if it is a little more frightening, and more amazing one than before. With proper support from IDEs, the fractal observation can help OO developers in resolving type errors they may find in their code in lesser time, and with more confidence.Comment: 18 page

Domain Theory for Modeling OOP: A Summary

Domain theory is `a mathematical theory that serves as a foundation for the semantics of programming languages'. Domains form the basis of a theory of partial information, which extends the familiar notion of partial function to encompass a whole spectrum of "degrees of definedness", so as to model incremental higher-order computation (i.e., computing with infinite data values, such as functions defined over an infinite domain like the domain of integers, infinite trees, and such as objects of object-oriented programming). General considerations from recursion theory dictate that partial functions are unavoidable in any discussion of computability. Domain theory provides an appropriately abstract setting in which the notion of a partial function can be lifted and used to give meaning to higher types, recursive types, etc. NOOP is a domain-theoretic model of nominally-typed OOP. NOOP was used to prove the identification of inheritance and subtyping in mainstream nominally-typed OO programming languages and the validity of this identification. In this report we first present the definitions of basic domain theoretic notions and domain constructors used in the construction of NOOP, then we present the construction of a simple structural model of OOP called COOP as a step towards the construction of NOOP. Like the construction of NOOP, the construction of COOP uses earlier presented domain constructors.Comment: 15 page

Finitary-based Domain Theory in Coq: An Early Report

In domain theory every finite computable object can be represented by a single mathematical object instead of a set of objects, using the notion of finitary-basis. In this article we report on our effort to formalize domain theory in Coq in terms of finitary-basis.Comment: 13 page

Novel Uses of Category Theory in Modeling OOP

An outline and summary of four new potential applications of category theory to OOP research are presented. These include (1) the use of operads to model Java subtyping, (2) the use of Yoneda's lemma and representable functors in the modeling of generic types in generic nominally-typed OOP, (3) using a combination of category presentations and cartesian closed categories to model structurally-typed OOP, and (4) the use of adjoint functors to model Java erasure.Comment: 8 page

Object-Oriented Theorem Proving (OOTP): First Thoughts

Automatic (i.e., computer-assisted) theorem proving (ATP) can come in many flavors. This document presents early steps in our effort towards defining object-oriented theorem proving (OOTP) as a new style of ATP. Traditional theorem proving (TTP) is the only well-known flavor of ATP so far. OOTP is a generalization of TTP. While TTP is strongly based on functional programming (FP), OOTP is strongly based on object-oriented programming (OOP) instead. We believe OOTP is a style of theorem proving that is no less powerful and no less natural than TTP and thus likely will be no less practically useful than TTP.Comment: 11 page

Java Subtyping as an Infinite Self-Similar Partial Graph Product

Due to supporting variance annotations, such as wildcard types, the subtyping relation in Java and other generic nominally-typed OO programming languages is both interesting and intricate. In these languages, the subtyping relation between ground object types, i.e., ones with no type variables, is the basis for defining the full OO subtyping relation, i.e., that includes type variables. As an ordering relation over the set of types, the subtyping relation in object-oriented programming languages can always be represented as a directed graph. In order to better understand some of the subtleties of the subtyping relation in Java, in this paper we present how the subtyping relation between ground Java types can be precisely constructed using two new operations (a binary operation and a unary one) on directed graphs. The binary operation we use, called a partial Cartesian graph product, is similar in its essence to standard graph products and group products. Its definition is based in particular on that of the standard Cartesian graph product. We believe the use of graph operations in constructing the ground generic Java subtyping relation reveals some of the not-immediately-obvious structure of the subtyping relation not only in Java but, more generally, also in mainstream generic nominally-typed OO programming languages such as C#, Scala and Kotlin. Accordingly, we believe that describing precisely how graph operations can be used to explicitly construct the subtyping relation in these languages, as we do in this paper, may significantly improve our understanding of features of the type systems of these languages such as wildcard types and variance annotations, and of the dependency of these features on nominal subtyping in nominally-typed OOP.Comment: 11 page

Towards Understanding Generics in Mainstream OOP

This article reports on steps towards building a simple and accurate domain-theoretic model of generic nominally-typed OOP.Comment: 29 page