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Adding State and Visibility Control to Traits Using Lexical Nesting

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ECOOP 2009 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5653))

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Abstract

Traits are reusable building blocks that can be composed to share methods across unrelated class hierarchies. Original traits are stateless and cannot express visibility control for methods. Two extensions, stateful traits and freezable traits, have been proposed to overcome these limitations. However, these extensions introduce complexity and have not yet been combined to simultaneously add both state and visibility control to traits.

This paper revisits the addition of state and visibility control to traits. Rather than extending the original traits model with additional operations, we allow traits to be lexically nested within other modules. Traits can then have (shared) state and visibility control by hiding variables or methods in their lexical scope. Although the Traits’ “flattening property” has to be revisited, the combination of traits with lexical nesting results in a simple and expressive trait model. We discuss an implementation of the model in AmbientTalk and specify its operational semantics.

Funded by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Program, Belgian State, Belgian Science Policy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programming Technology Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

    Tom Van Cutsem & Wolfgang De Meuter

  2. RMoD research group, INRIA Lille, France

    Alexandre Bergel & Stéphane Ducasse

Authors
  1. Tom Van Cutsem
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  2. Alexandre Bergel
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  3. Stéphane Ducasse
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  4. Wolfgang De Meuter
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Sophia Drossopoulou

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Van Cutsem, T., Bergel, A., Ducasse, S., De Meuter, W. (2009). Adding State and Visibility Control to Traits Using Lexical Nesting. In: Drossopoulou, S. (eds) ECOOP 2009 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03013-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03013-0_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03012-3

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