research-article

CZ: multiple inheritance without diamonds

Authors:

Donna Malayeri,

Jonathan AldrichAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '09: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

Pages 21 - 40

https://doi.org/10.1145/1640089.1640092

Published: 25 October 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Multiple inheritance has long been plagued with the "diamond" inheritance problem, leading to solutions that restrict expressiveness, such as mixins and traits. Instead, we address the diamond problem directly, considering two difficulties it causes: ensuring a correct semantics for object initializers, and typechecking multiple dispatch in a modular fashion-the latter problem arising even with multiple interface inheritance. We show that previous solutions to these problems are either unsatisfactory or cumbersome, and suggest a novel approach: supporting multiple inheritance but forbidding diamond inheritance. Expressiveness is retained through two features: a "requires" construct that provides a form of subtyping without inheritance (inspired by Scala), and a dynamically-dispatched "super" call similar to that found in traits. Through examples, we illustrate that inheritance diamonds can be eliminated via a combination of "requires" and ordinary inheritance. We provide a sound formal model for our language and demonstrate its modularity and expressiveness.

References

[1]

R. Agrawal, L. DeMichiel, and B. Lindsay. Static type checking of multi-methods. In OOPSLA, pages 113--128, 1991.

Digital Library

[2]

E. Allen, D. Chase, J. Hallett, V. Luchangco, J. Maessen, S. Ryu, G. Steele, Jr., and S. Tobin-Hochstadt. The Fortress Language Specification, Version 1.0. Available at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/Publications/fortress.1.0.pdf, 2008. Accessed 3/09.

[3]

E. Allen, J. J. Hallett, V. Luchangco, S. Ryu, and G. L. Steele Jr. Modular multiple dispatch with multiple inheritance. In SAC '07, pages 1117--1121. ACM, 2007.

Digital Library

[4]

D. Ancona, G. Lagorio, and E. Zucca. Jam - designing a Java extension with mixins. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 25(5):641--712, 2003.

Digital Library

[5]

D. Ancona and E. Zucca. An algebraic approach to mixins and modularity. In Algebraic and Logic Programming, pages 179--193, 1996.

Digital Library

[6]

G. Baumgartner, M. Jansche, and K. Laufer. Half&Half: Multiple dispatch and retroactive abstraction for Java. Technical Report OSU-CISRC-5/01-TR08, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, March 2002.

[7]

A. Bergel. Personal communication, October 2008.

[8]

A. Bergel, S. Ducasse, O. Nierstrasz, and R. Wuyts. Stateful traits and their formalization. Computer Languages, Systems&Structures, 34(2-3):83--108, 2008.

Digital Library

[9]

L. Bettini, V. Bono, and S. Likavec. A core calculus of higher-order mixins and classes. In SAC, pages 1508--1509, 2004.

Digital Library

[10]

J. Bloch. Effective Java: Programming Language Guide. Addison-Wesley, 2001.

Digital Library

[11]

J. Boyland and G. Castagna. Parasitic methods: An implementation of multi-methods for Java. In OOPSLA, pages 66--76, 1997.

Digital Library

[12]

G. Bracha and W. Cook. Mixin-based inheritance. In ECOOP '90, 1990.

Digital Library

[13]

B. Carré and J. Geib. The point of view notion for multiple inheritance. In OOPSLA/ECOOP '90, pages 312--321. ACM, 1990.

Digital Library

[14]

C. Chambers. Object-oriented multi-methods in Cecil. In ECOOP '92, 1992.

Digital Library

[15]

C. Chambers and the Cecil Group. The Cecil language: specification and rationale, Version 3.2. Available at http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/, 2004. Accessed 3/09.

[16]

C. Clifton, G. T. Leavens, C. Chambers, and T. Millstein. MultiJava: modular open classes and symmetric multiple dispatch for Java. In OOPSLA '00, pages 130--145, 2000.

Digital Library

[17]

C. Clifton, T. Millstein, G. T. Leavens, and C. Chambers. MultiJava: Design rationale, compiler implementation, and applications. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 28(3):517--575, 2006.

Digital Library

[18]

W. Cook, W. Hill, and P. Canning. Inheritance is not subtyping. In POPL, pages 125--135, 1990.

Digital Library

[19]

S. Ducasse, O. Nierstrasz, N. Scharli, R. Wuyts, and A.P. Black. Traits: A mechanism for fine-grained reuse. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 28(2):331--388, 2006.

Digital Library

[20]

T. Ekman and G. Hedin. JastAdd. http://www.jastadd.org, 2008. Accessed 3/09.

[21]

M. Ellis and B. Stroustrup. The Annotated C++ Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 1990.

Digital Library

[22]

R.B. Findler and M. Flatt. Modular object-oriented programming with units and mixins. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 34(1):94--104, 1999.

Digital Library

[23]

K. Fisher and J. Reppy. A typed calculus of traits. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Foundations of Object-oriented Programming, January 2004.

[24]

M. Flatt, S. Krishnamurthi, and M. Felleisen. Classes and mixins. In POPL '98, 1998.

Digital Library

[25]

C. Frost and T. Millstein. Modularly typesafe interface dispatch in JPred. In FOOL/WOOD'06, January 2006.

[26]

D. Hovemeyer and W. Pugh. Finding bugs is easy. SIGPLAN Not., 39(12):92--106, 2004.

Digital Library

[27]

N. C. Hutchinson. EMERALD: An object-based language for distributed programming. PhD thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 1987.

Digital Library

[28]

A. Igarashi, B. Pierce, and P. Wadler. Featherwieght Java: a Minimal Core Calculus for Java and GJ. In OOPSLA '99, November 1999.

Digital Library

[29]

E. Johnsen, O. Owe, and I. Yu. Creol: A type-safe object-oriented model for distributed concurrent systems. Theor. Comput. Sci., 365(1):23--66, 2006.

Digital Library

[30]

D. Malayeri. CZ: Multiple inheritance without diamonds. In FOOL '09, January 2009.

[31]

D. Malayeri and J. Aldrich. CZ: Multimethods and multiple inheritance without diamonds. Technical Report CMU-CS-09-153, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, August 2009.

[32]

B. Meyer. Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd Edition. Prentice-Hall, 1997.

Digital Library

[33]

S. Meyers. Effective C++: 50 specific ways to improve your programs and designs. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc. Redwood City, CA, USA, 1992.

Digital Library

[34]

Microsoft Corporation. C# language specification, version 3.0. Available at http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/8/8/388e7205-bc10-4226-b2a8-75%351c669b09/csharp%20language%20specification.doc, 2007. Accessed 8/09.

[35]

T. Millstein, C. Bleckner, and C. Chambers. Modular typechecking for hierarchically extensible datatypes and functions. In ICFP '02, 2002.

Digital Library

[36]

T. Millstein, C. Bleckner, and C. Chambers. Modular typechecking for hierarchically extensible datatypes and functions. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 26(5):836--889, 2004.

Digital Library

[37]

T. Millstein and C. Chambers. Modular statically typed multimethods. Inf. Comput., 175(1):76--118, 2002.

[38]

N. Nystrom, S. Chong, and A. Myers. Scalable extensibility via nested inheritance. In OOPSLA '04, pages 99--115, 2004.

Digital Library

[39]

M. Odersky. The Scala language specification. Available at http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaReference.pdf, 2007. Accessed 3/09.

[40]

M. Odersky and M. Zenger. Scalable Component Abstractions. In OOPSLA '05, 2005.

Digital Library

[41]

A. Paepcke. Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective. The MIT Press, 1993.

Digital Library

[42]

P. Pirkelbauer, Y. Solodkyy, and B. Stroustrup. Open multi-methods for C++. In GPCE '07, pages 123--134, 2007.

Digital Library

[43]

M. Sakkinen. Disciplined inheritance. In ECOOP, pages 39--56, 1989.

[44]

N. Scharli, S. Ducasse, O. Nierstrasz, and A.P. Black. Traits: Composable Units of Behaviour. In ECOOP '03. Springer, 2003.

[45]

A. Shalit. The Dylan Reference Manual: The Definitive Guide to the New Object-Oriented Dynamic Language. Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Digital Library

[46]

G. Singh. Single versus multiple inheritance in object oriented programming. SIGPLAN OOPS Mess., 5(1):34--43, 1994.

Digital Library

[47]

A. Snyder. Encapsulation and inheritance in object-oriented programming languages. In OOPSLA, pages 38--45, 1986.

Digital Library

[48]

G. L. Steele, Jr. Common LISP: The Language. Digital Press, second edition, 1990.

Digital Library

[49]

C. Szyperski, S. Omohundro, and S. Murer. Engineering a programming language: The type and class system of Sather. In J. Gutknecht, editor, Programming Languages and System Architectures, volume 782 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 1993.

Digital Library

[50]

G. Washburn. Personal communication, December 2008.

Cited By

Demey L(2017)The Porphyrian Tree and Multiple Inheritance: A Rejoinder to Tylman on Computer Science and PhilosophyFoundations of Science10.1007/s10699-017-9531-123:1(173-180)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-017-9531-1
Wang YZhang HOliveira BServetto M(2016)Classless JavaACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093335.299323852:3(14-24)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3093335.2993238
Wang YZhang HOliveira BServetto MFischer BSchaefer I(2016)Classless JavaProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/2993236.2993238(14-24)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2993236.2993238
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

CZ: multiple inheritance without diamonds
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

Recommendations

CZ: multiple inheritance without diamonds
OOPSLA '09

Multiple inheritance has long been plagued with the "diamond" inheritance problem, leading to solutions that restrict expressiveness, such as mixins and traits. Instead, we address the diamond problem directly, considering two difficulties it causes: ...
Type checking modular multiple dispatch with parametric polymorphism and multiple inheritance
OOPSLA '11

In previous work, we presented rules for defining overloaded functions that ensure type safety under symmetric multiple dispatch in an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance, and we showed how to check these rules without requiring the ...
CZ: multiple inheritance without diamonds
OOPSLA Companion '08: Companion to the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications

Multiple inheritance has long been plagued with the "diamond" inheritance problem, spurring a variety of solutions, such as virtual inheritance, mixins and traits. We offer a different solution: a language that supports multiple inheritance but forbids ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '09: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

October 2009

590 pages

ISBN:9781605587660

DOI:10.1145/1640089

General Chair:
Shail Arora
Adayana, Inc.
,
Program Chair:
Gary Leavens
University of Central Florida

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 44, Issue 10
OOPSLA '09
October 2009
554 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1639949
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 October 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

OOPSLA09

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

OOPSLA09: ACM SIGPLAN Object Oriented Programming Systems and Applications Conference

October 25 - 29, 2009

Florida, Orlando, USA

Acceptance Rates

OOPSLA '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 144 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

18
Total Citations
View Citations
563
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)10
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 20 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Demey L(2017)The Porphyrian Tree and Multiple Inheritance: A Rejoinder to Tylman on Computer Science and PhilosophyFoundations of Science10.1007/s10699-017-9531-123:1(173-180)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-017-9531-1
Wang YZhang HOliveira BServetto M(2016)Classless JavaACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093335.299323852:3(14-24)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3093335.2993238
Wang YZhang HOliveira BServetto MFischer BSchaefer I(2016)Classless JavaProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/2993236.2993238(14-24)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2993236.2993238
Šlajchrt Z(2016)Object MetamorphismProceedings of the 2015 Federated Conference on Software Development and Object Technologies10.1007/978-3-319-46535-7_24(311-335)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46535-7_24
Oney SMyers BBrandt JBenko HDontcheva MWigdor D(2014)InterStateProceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology10.1145/2642918.2647358(263-272)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2642918.2647358
Martin MMezini MErdweg S(2013)Template constructors for reusable object initializationACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2637365.251721249:3(43-52)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2637365.2517212
Martin MMezini MErdweg SJärvi JKästner C(2013)Template constructors for reusable object initializationProceedings of the 12th international conference on Generative programming: concepts & experiences10.1145/2517208.2517212(43-52)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517208.2517212
Takeshita WChiba S(2013)Method Shells: Avoiding Conflicts on Destructive Class Extensions by Implicit Context SwitchesSoftware Composition10.1007/978-3-642-39614-4_4(49-64)Online publication date: 2013
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39614-4_4
Rástočný KRástočný K(2012)UML – A Part of an Interlocking System Development ProcessTelematics in the Transport Environment10.1007/978-3-642-34050-5_33(293-300)Online publication date: 2012
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34050-5_33
Bono VKuśmierek JMulatero M(2012)MagdaProceedings of the 26th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_25(560-588)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_25
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents