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Defining Name Accessibility Using Scope Graphs

Authors Aron Zwaan , Casper Bach Poulsen

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  • Software and its engineering → Compilers
  • Software and its engineering → Language features
  • Theory of computation → Program constructs
Keywords
  • access modifier
  • visibility
  • scope graph
  • name resolution

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Abstract

Many programming languages allow programmers to regulate accessibility; i.e., annotating a declaration with keywords such as export and private to indicate where it can be accessed. Despite the importance of name accessibility for, e.g., compilers, editor auto-completion and tooling, and automated refactorings, few existing type systems provide a formal account of name accessibility.
We present a declarative, executable, and language-parametric model for name accessibility, which provides a formal specification of name accessibility in Java, C#, C++, Rust, and Eiffel. We achieve this by defining name accessibility as a predicate on resolution paths through scope graphs. Since scope graphs are a language-independent model of name resolution, our model provides a uniform approach to defining different accessibility policies for different languages.
Our model is implemented in Statix, a logic language for executable type system specification using scope graphs. We evaluate its correctness on a test suite that compares it with the C#, Java, and Rust compilers, and show we can synthesize access modifiers in programs with holes accurately.

Cite As Get BibTex

Aron Zwaan and Casper Bach Poulsen. Defining Name Accessibility Using Scope Graphs. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 47:1-47:29, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.47

Author Details

Aron Zwaan
  • Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Casper Bach Poulsen
  • Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Acknowledgements

We thank Friedrich Steimann for challenging us to specify and formalize access modifiers using scope graphs, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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References

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