Propagating class and method combination

Abstract

This paper presents a mixin based class and method combination mechanism with block structure propagation. Traditionally, mixins can be composed to form new classes, possibly merging the implementations of methods (as in CLOS). In our approach, a class or method combination operation may cause any number of implicit combinations. For example, it is possible to specify separate aspects of a family of classes, and then combine several aspects into a full-fledged class family. The combination expressions would explicitly combine whole-family aspects, and by propagation implicitly combine the aspects for each member of the class family, and again by propagation implicitly compose each method from its aspects. As opposed to CLOS, this is type-checked statically; and as opposed to other systems for advanced class combination/ merging/weaving, it is integrated directly in the language, ensuring a clear semantics and a seamless interaction with the type system. Moreover, the basic mechanism used in the combination, linearization, is formalized and generalized compared to previous presentions.