Beyond Inheritance, Aspects & Roles: A Unified Scheme for Object and Program Composition

Gedenryd, Henrik S. (2002). Beyond Inheritance, Aspects & Roles: A Unified Scheme for Object and Program Composition. Technical Report 2002/09; Department of Computing, The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00015fe9

Abstract

The areas of inheritance, aspect-oriented programming and rolebased decomposition share the same problem: For all three, the number of candidate schemes is large, all of them different and none of them clearly superior to the rest. Instead of proposing another variation on any of them, this paper presents a simple, unified approach to program composition. The scheme is shown to be compositionally complete, that is, to be sufficient for defining any program composition that is theoretically possible, and therefore forms a superset of all other approaches to program composition. The paper shows how this scheme specifically may supersede inheritance, aspects, and roles. It goes on to show via examples how the scheme can be used as a practical objectoriented language construct. Lastly, it demonstrates how the scheme can be combined with program specialization to yield very good runtime performance. This scheme can make objectoriented languages smaller, yet substantially more powerful and expressive than they currently are.

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