Premium
A technique for subclassing and its implementation exploiting polymorphic procedures
Author(s) -
Mancini Luigi V.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380180402
Subject(s) - smalltalk , computer science , programming language , programmer , simula , inheritance (genetic algorithm) , object oriented programming , multiple inheritance , scheme (mathematics) , mathematics , mathematical analysis , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
Since the introduction of Smalltalk, the object‐oriented approach towards the organization of data and programs has become popular. In this paper the possibilities of exploiting procedure‐oriented languages to allow an object‐oriented style of programming are analysed. Although the two approaches are apparently dissimilar, a family of procedure‐oriented languages is described which allows a high degree of freedom in programming and does not appear to restrain the programmer within the procedure‐oriented scheme. Popular languages of this family are ML and PS‐Algol. For such languages, a technique is developed which enables an efficient implementation of object‐oriented features, such as the subclassing form of inheritance provided by Smalltalk‐80 and Simula.