Design, Implementaion and Evaluation of a Declarative Object-Oriented Programming Language

摘要

The thesis is a detailed study of FOOPS, a 'wide spectrum' object-oriented programming language. FOOPS supports all of the classical features of the object paradigm, including classes, overloading, polymorphism, and multiple class inheritance with overriding and dynamic binding. However, it goes beyond other object-oriented languages in its facilities for the specification, composition and reuse of modules. FOOPS is patterned after OBJ, a functional programming language, and from which it derives several of these facilities. The theses considers the design of FOOPS, explaining all its features and examining their application to the design and development of object-oriented systems. Also, it describes a prototype implementation of FOOPS that was built using facilities given by the implementation of OBJ3, and which supports most features. Moreover, the thesis performs an in-depth evaluation of FOOPS that focuses on large-grain issues such as the distinction between classes and modules, module instantiation with views, vertical and horizontal structuring, and integrated support for specification and prototyping; comparisons with many other languages are given. Additionally, this thesis presents a detailed summary of current work towards a mathematical semantics for FOOPS.