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Simple Ownership Types for Object Containment

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ECOOP 2001 — Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2072))

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Abstract

Containment of objects is a natural concept that has been poorly supported in object-oriented programming languages. For a predefined set of ownership contexts, this paper presents a type system that enforces certain containment relationships for run-time objects. A fixed ordering relationship is presumed between the owners.

The formalisation of ownership types has developed from our work with flexible alias protection together with an investigation of structural properties of object graphs based on dominator trees. Our general ownership type system permits fresh ownership contexts to be created at run-time. Here we present a simplified system in which the ownership contexts are predefined. This is powerful enough to express and enforce constraints about a system’s high-level structure.

Our formal system is presented in an imperative variant of the object calculus. We present type preservation and soundness results. Furthermore we highlight how these type theoretic results establish a containment invariant for objects, in which access to contained objects is only permitted via their owners. In effect, the predefined ownership ordering restricts the permissible inter-object reference structure.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University Utrecht, The Netherlands

    David G. Clarke

  2. School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand

    James Noble

  3. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    John M. Potter

Authors
  1. David G. Clarke
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  2. James Noble
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  3. John M. Potter
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Åbogade 34, 8200, Århus N, Denmark

    Jørgen Lindskov Knudsen

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Clarke, D.G., Noble, J., Potter, J.M. (2001). Simple Ownership Types for Object Containment. In: Knudsen, J.L. (eds) ECOOP 2001 — Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2072. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45337-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45337-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42206-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45337-6

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