English

An effectful object calculus

Programming Languages 2025-04-23 v1

Abstract

We show how to smoothly incorporate in the object-oriented paradigm constructs to raise, compose, and handle effects in an arbitrary monad. The underlying pure calculus is meant to be a representative of the last generation of OO languages, and the effectful extension is manageable enough for ordinary programmers; notably, constructs to raise effects are just special methods. We equip the calculus with an expressive type-and-effect system, which, again by relying on standard features such as inheritance and generic types, allows a simple form of effect polymorphism. The soundness of the type-and-effect system is expressed and proved by a recently introduced technique, where the semantics is formalized by a one-step reduction relation from language expressions into monadic ones, so that it is enough to prove progress and subject reduction properties on this relation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.15936,
  title  = {An effectful object calculus},
  author = {Francesco Dagnino and Paola Giannini and Elena Zucca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15936},
  year   = {2025}
}