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Aliasing, Confinement, and Ownership in Object-Oriented Programming

Report on the Workshop IWACO’08 at ECOOP 2008

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Object-Oriented Technology. ECOOP 2008 Workshop Reader (ECOOP 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5475))

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Abstract

The power of objects lies in the flexibility of their interconnection structure. But this flexibility comes at a cost. Because an object can be modified via any alias, object-oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyze. Aliasing makes objects depend on their environment in unpredictable ways, breaking the encapsulation necessary for reliable software components, making it difficult to reason about and optimize programs, obscuring the flow of information between objects, and introducing security problems.

Aliasing is a fundamental difficulty, but we accept its presence. Instead we seek techniques for describing, reasoning about, restricting, analyzing, and preventing the connections between objects and/or the flow of information between them. Promising approaches to these problems are based on ownership, confinement, information flow, sharing control, escape analysis, argument independence, read-only references, effects systems, and access control mechanisms.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

    Dave Clarke

  2. Imperial College, London, UK

    Sophia Drossopoulou

  3. ETH Zurich, Switzerland

    Peter Müller

  4. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

    James Noble

  5. Purdue University, USA

    Tobias Wrigstad

Authors
  1. Dave Clarke
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  2. Sophia Drossopoulou
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  3. Peter Müller
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  4. James Noble
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  5. Tobias Wrigstad
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, 305 N University St, IN 47907, West Lafayette, USA

    Patrick Eugster

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Clarke, D., Drossopoulou, S., Müller, P., Noble, J., Wrigstad, T. (2009). Aliasing, Confinement, and Ownership in Object-Oriented Programming. In: Eugster, P. (eds) Object-Oriented Technology. ECOOP 2008 Workshop Reader. ECOOP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5475. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02047-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02047-6_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02046-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02047-6

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