Automated support for seamless interoperability in polylingual software systems
SIGSOFT '96 Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The Exu Approach to Safe, Transparent and Lightweight Interoperability
COMPSAC '01 Proceedings of the 25th International Computer Software and Applications Conference on Invigorating Software Development
Toward Pure Polylingual Persistence
POS-9 Revised Papers from the 9th International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems
Polylingual systems: an approach to seamless interoperability
Polylingual systems: an approach to seamless interoperability
Foundations for polylingual systems
Foundations for polylingual systems
Operational semantics for multi-language programs
Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Isabelle/HOL: a proof assistant for higher-order logic
Isabelle/HOL: a proof assistant for higher-order logic
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Building multi-lingual software is a practical necessity. At present, with object-oriented programming the dominant paradigm, it is common to assemble software systems comprising components written in at least two different object-oriented languages. Modern object-oriented languages provide exception handling mechanisms as a means of enriching the signatures of methods with a specification of what to do if the method ''fails'', i.e., cannot carry out its intended (normal) function for some reason. Indeed, Java and C++ (and many other object-oriented languages, including C#) have remarkably similar exception handling mechanisms. As we demonstrate, however, those exception handling mechanisms do not necessarily interoperate smoothly when used in multi-lingual software systems. We believe that our long-term goal of maximally effortless and error-free multi-lingual programming requires automated tools that are based on solid formal foundations. Toward that end, we have developed a formal language, which we call RIPLS, that can be used to rigorously study properties of multi-lingual software. In this paper, we demonstrate RIPLS and our approach by using it to study exception handling in multilingual object-oriented systems, and show how use of our methods can identify problems that standard techniques cannot. We then exhibit a correctly-working version of multi-lingual exception-handling and use our methods to confirm its correctness. Finally we discuss how experience with these RIPLS-based methods has informed our designs for automated tools that will implement correctly-working multi-lingual exception handling. This work makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that formal, theoretical foundations can be used to solve practical problems in multi-lingual software development.