External uniqueness is unique enough

Abstract

External uniqueness is a surprising new way to add unique references to an OOPL. The idea is that an externally unique reference is the only reference into an aggregate from outside the aggregate. Internal references which do not escape the boundary of the aggregate are innocuous and therefore permitted. Based on ownership types, our proposal not only overcomes an abstraction problem from which existing uniqueness proposals suffer, it also enables many examples which are inherently not unique, such as a unique reference to a set of links in a doubly-linked list, without losing the benefits of uniqueness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.