Logical foundations of object-oriented and frame-based languages

  • Authors:
  • Michael Kifer;Georg Lausen;James Wu

  • Affiliations:
  • State Univ. of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook;Univ. Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany;Renaissance Software, Los Altos, CA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

We propose a novel formalism, called Frame Logic (abbr., F-logic), that accounts in a clean and declarative fashion for most of the structural aspects of object-oriented and frame-based languages. These features include object identity, complex objects, inheritance, polymorphic types, query methods, encapsulation, and others. In a sense, F-logic stands in the same relationship to the object-oriented paradigm as classical predicate calculus stands to relational programming. F-logic has a model-theoretic semantics and a sound and complete resolution-based proof theory. A small number of fundamental concepts that come from object-oriented programming have direct representation in F-logic; other, secondary aspects of this paradigm are easily modeled as well. The paper also discusses semantic issues pertaining to programming with a deductive object-oriented language based on a subset of F-logic.