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Reversible Object-Oriented Interpreters

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ECOOP’ 87 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 1987)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 276))

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Abstract

The “programs are data” philosophy of Lisp uses Lisp’s S-expressions to represent programs, and permits a program written in Lisp itself to implement the interpreter for the language. Object-oriented languages can take this one step further: we can use objects to represent programs. and an object-oriented interpreter takes the form of responses to a protocol of messages for evaluating programs. Because objects are a richer data structure than simple S-expressions, the representation of programs can have more built-in intelligence than was feasible using simple list manipulation alone.

This paper surveys techniques and applications for object-oriented interpreters. We focus particularly on object-oriented interpreters that are reversible, those that, unlike conventional interpreters, remember their history of evaluation. We illustrate the techniques involved with two applications of reversible object-oriented interpreters: a reversible stepper for Lisp, and a programming environment which constructs Lisp programs from examples.

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References

  1. Adele Goldberg and David Robson. Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., USA, 1983.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 02139, USA

    Henry Lieberman

Authors
  1. Henry Lieberman
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire d’Informatique, LIB, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 6, avenue V. le Gorgeu, F-29287, Brest Cédex, France

    Jean Bézivin

  2. 54, avenue des Gressets, F-92700, La Celle Saint-Cloud, France

    Jean-Marie Hullot

  3. Rank Xerox France, DRBI, 12, place de l’Iris, F-92071, La Défense, Cedex 38, France

    Pierre Cointe

  4. The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 545, Technology Square, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Henry Lieberman

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© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lieberman, H. (1987). Reversible Object-Oriented Interpreters. In: Bézivin, J., Hullot, JM., Cointe, P., Lieberman, H. (eds) ECOOP’ 87 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1987. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 276. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47891-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47891-4_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-18353-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47891-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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