Abstract
This paper presents initial ideas for the design and implementation of a reversible object-oriented language based on extending Janus with object-oriented concepts such as classes that encapsulate behavior and state, inheritance, virtual dispatching, as well as constructors. We show that virtual dispatching is a reversible decision mechanism easily translatable to a standard reversible programming model such as Janus, and we argue that reversible management of state can be accomplished using reversible constructors. The language is implemented in terms of translation to standard Janus programs.
The authors acknowledge partial support from COST Action IC1405 Reversible Computation. H.B. Axelsen was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research \(\mid \) Natural Sciences under the Foundations of Reversible Computing project.
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Notes
- 1.
We here follow the memory model of Janus, where variables can be dynamically allocated on the call stack using a local declaration that initializes the variable to a given value, but must symmetrically by deallocated using a delocal declaration that must provide the final value of the variable, resetting the memory and providing an initializer for the variable when running the program in reverse.
- 2.
Source code for compiler, examples, and generated Janus programs are available at https://github.com/joule-lang/joule/tree/master/doc/papers/rc16.
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Schultz, U.P., Axelsen, H.B. (2016). Elements of a Reversible Object-Oriented Language. In: Devitt, S., Lanese, I. (eds) Reversible Computation. RC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9720. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40578-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40578-0_10
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