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Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming. Types, Analysis and Verification pp 471–500Cite as

Location Types for Safe Programming with Near and Far References

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7850))

Abstract

In distributed object-oriented systems, objects belong to different locations. For example, in Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI), objects can be distributed over different Java virtual machines. Accessing a reference in RMI has crucially different semantics depending on whether the referred object is local or remote. Nevertheless, such references are not statically distinguished by the Java type system.

This chapter presents location types, which statically distinguish far from near references. We present a formal type system for a minimal core language and develop a type inference system that gives maximally precise solutions satisfying further desirable properties. We prove soundness of the type system as well as soundness and correctness of the inference system. We have implemented location types as a pluggable type system for the ABS language, an object-oriented language with a concurrency and distribution model based on concurrent object groups. To facilitate programming with location types, we provide a tight integration of the type and inference system with an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) that presents inference results as overlays to the source code. The IDE drastically reduces the annotation overhead while providing full static type information to the programmer.

This work is partially supported by the EU project FP7-231620 HATS: Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Yannick Welsch, Jan Schäfer & Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter

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  1. Yannick Welsch
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  2. Jan Schäfer
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  3. Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001, Heverlee, Belgium

    Dave Clarke

  2. School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, Cottn Building, Gate 6, Kelburn Parade, 6140, Wellington, New Zealand

    James Noble

  3. Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Lägerhyddsvägen 2, 75237, Uppsala, Sweden

    Tobias Wrigstad

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Welsch, Y., Schäfer, J., Poetzsch-Heffter, A. (2013). Location Types for Safe Programming with Near and Far References. In: Clarke, D., Noble, J., Wrigstad, T. (eds) Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming. Types, Analysis and Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7850. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36946-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36946-9_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36945-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36946-9

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