Integrating coercion with subtyping and multiple dispatch

Authors:
J. J. Hallett;Victor Luchangco;Sukyoung Ryu;Guy L. Steele, Jr.
Affiliations:
Boston University;Sun Microsystems;Sun Microsystems;Sun Microsystems
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Year:
2008

Citing 5
Cited 0

The C programming language

The C programming language
The Java Language Specification

The Java Language Specification
Growing a Language

Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
Traits: A mechanism for fine-grained reuse

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Modular multiple dispatch with multiple inheritance

Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computing

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Coercion can greatly improve the readability of programs, especially in arithmetic expressions. However, coercion interacts with other features of programming languages, particularly subtyping and overloaded functions and operators, in ways that can produce surprising behavior. We study examples of such surprising behavior in existing languages. This study informs the design of the coercion mechanism of Fortress, an object-oriented language with multiple dynamic dispatch, multiple inheritance and user-defined coercion. We describe this design and show how its restrictions on overloaded declarations prevent ambiguous calls due to coercion.