Sound and Relaxed Behavioural Inheritance

Amalio, Nuno (2019) Sound and Relaxed Behavioural Inheritance. In: From Astrophysics to Unconventional Computation: Essays Presented to Susan Stepney on the Occasion of her 60th Birthday. Emergence, Complexity and Computation, 35 (35). Springer, Switzerland, pp. 255-298. ISBN 9783030157913

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Abstract

Object-oriented (OO) inheritance establishes taxonomies of OO classes. Behavioural inheritance (BI), a strong version, emphasises substitutability: objects of child classes replace objects of their ascendant classes without any observable effect difference on the system. BI is related to data refinement, but refinement's constrictions rule out many useful OO subclassings. This paper revisits BI at the light of Z and the theory of data refinement. It studies existing solutions to this problem, criticises them, and proposes improved relaxations. The results are applicable to any OO language that supports design-by-contract (DbC). The paper's contributions include three novel BI relaxations supported by a mathematical model with proofs carried out in the Isabelle proof assistant, and an examination of BI in the DbC languages Eiffel, JML and Spec#.

Item Type:	Book Section
Identification Number:	10.1007/978-3-030-15792-0_11
Dates:	Date Event 2019 UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-04 - software engineering
Divisions:	Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment > College of Computing
Depositing User:	Nuno Amalio
Date Deposited:	13 Jun 2019 07:28
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2022 13:00
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/7583

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