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super-Charging Object-Oriented Programming Through Precise Typing of Open Recursion

Authors Andong Fan , Lionel Parreaux

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Andong Fan
  • The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, China
Lionel Parreaux
  • The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, China

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers, Yaozhu Sun, and Marco Servetto for their helpful comments, as well as Cunyuan Gao for his help with the implementation. This work follows up on concepts previously presented by the first author as a research abstract [Fan, 2022].

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Andong Fan and Lionel Parreaux. super-Charging Object-Oriented Programming Through Precise Typing of Open Recursion. In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 11:1-11:28, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.11

Abstract

We present a new variation of object-oriented programming built around three simple and orthogonal constructs: classes for storing object state, interfaces for expressing object types, and mixins for reusing and overriding implementations. We show that the latter can be made uniquely expressive by leveraging a novel feature that we call precisely-typed open recursion. This features uses "this" and "super" annotations to express the requirements of any given partial method implementation on the types of respectively the current object and the inherited definitions. Crucially, the fact that mixins do not introduce types nor subtyping relationships means they can be composed even when the overriding and overridden methods have incomparable types. Together with advanced type inference and structural typing support provided by the MLscript programming language, we show that this enables an elegant and powerful solution to the Expression Problem.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Object oriented languages
Keywords
  • Object-Oriented Programming
  • the Expression Problem
  • Open Recursion

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