TR-2006-02
A foundation for trait-based metaprogramming (extended version)
John Reppy; Aaron Turon. 1 February, 2006.
Communicated by John Reppy.
Abstract
Scharli et al. introduced traits as reusable units of behavior
independent of the inheritance hierarchy. Despite their relative
simplicity, traits offer a surprisingly rich calculus. Trait calculi
typically include operations for resolving conflicts when composing
two traits. In the existing work on traits, these operations (method
exclusion and aliasing) are shallow, i.e., they have no effect on
the body of the other methods in the trait. In this paper, we
present a new trait system, based on the Fisher-Reppy trait calculus,
that adds deep operations (method hiding and renaming) to support
conflict resolution. The proposed operations are deep in the sense
that they preserve any existing connections between the affected
method and the other methods of the trait. Our system uses
Riecke-Stone dictionaries to support these features. In addition,
we define a more fine-grained mechanism for tracking trait types
than in previous systems. The resulting calculus is more flexible
and expressive, and can serve as the foundation for trait-based
metaprogramming, an idiom we introduce. This is an extended version
of our workshop paper with the complete formal model and additional
details for the soundness proof.
Original Document
The original document is available in PDF (uploaded 1 February, 2006 by
John Reppy).
