A Type System for First-Class Layers with Inheritance, Subtyping, and Swapping
Abstract
Context-Oriented Programming (COP) is a programming paradigm to encourage modularization of context-dependent software. Key features of COP are layers---modules to describe context-dependent behavioral variations of a software system---and their dynamic activation, which can modify the behavior of multiple objects that have already been instantiated. Typechecking programs written in a COP language is difficult because the activation of a layer can even change objects' interfaces. Inoue et al. have informally discussed how to make JCop, an extension of Java for COP by Appeltauer et al., type-safe. In this article, we formalize a small COP language called ContextFJ with its operational semantics and type system and show its type soundness. The language models main features of the type-safe version of JCop, including dynamically activated first-class layers, inheritance of layer definitions, layer subtyping, and layer swapping.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.01453,
title = {A Type System for First-Class Layers with Inheritance, Subtyping, and Swapping},
author = {Hiroaki Inoue and Atsushi Igarashi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.01453},
year = {2019}
}