Conformance, Generlclty, Inheritance and Enhancement

摘要

A recent paper by Meyer compared the usefulness Of Genericity and Inheritance as a basis fur static type checking in object oriented systems. Conformance is also being considered by some researchers, and Meyer's paper is reexamined here using Conformance. Some problems result related to the conformance of formal and actual parameters of operations. Additional rules for conformance are introduced to overcome these problems and these lead naturally to the concept of Enhancement as a union of the techniques of Conformance, Genericity and Inheritance.rnThis work has been partially sponsored under the ESPRIT programme, in project 834 Comandos - Construction and Management of Distributed Office Systems.