Type Safety in the Context of Method Updates

  • Authors:

  • Zahir Tari;Xue Li;Ling Liu

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. zahirt@cs.rmit.edu.au;School of Information Systems and Management, The University of New South Wales, Australia. xueli@unsw.edu.au;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute, USA. lingliu@cse.ogi.edu

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Intelligent Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper presents a framework for checking and maintaining type safety in the presence of method evolution. A method update often affects all components of the method,including the inter face and the implementation. The type safety problem is addressed as two levels of type consistency. The first level relates to the type checking of methods in the context of the class inheritance hierarchy, and concerns thesemantics of the polymorphism of methods. The second level considers the implementation parts of methods by capturingand preserving the semantics of the chain of calling relationships amongrelevant methods. A graph-based approach is used to achieve this two-leveltype consistency required at the level of class inheritance hierarchy and the level ofmethod invocation. We demonstrate that the two levels of type consistency checking combined provide a better control of the run-time type error problems.