First-class relationships in an object-oriented language

  • Authors:
  • Gavin Bierman;Alisdair Wren

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, Cambridge;University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

  • Venue:
  • ECOOP'05 Proceedings of the 19th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this paper we investigate the addition of first-class relationships to a prototypical object-oriented programming language (a “middleweight” fragment of Java). We provide language-level constructs to declare relationships between classes and to manipulate relationship instances. We allow relationships to have attributes and provide a novel notion of relationship inheritance. We formalize our language giving both the type system and operational semantics and prove certain key safety properties.