Consistency of inheritance in object-oriented languages and of static, ALGOL-like binding

Abstract

ALGOL60 introduced the block level structure with its characteristic static binding and visibility scopes of identifiers, phenomena known before in predicate logics and λ-calculi outside programming. Misinterpretations and misimplementations of originally intended static scope semantics of ALGOL60 and Lisp have seduced language designers and practitioners to a notion of dynamic scope semantics which suppresses identifier renamings during program execution. Dynamic scoping has become popular above all in object-oriented programming, although the inventors of the latter and authors of Simula 67, O.-J. Dahl and K. Nygaard, explicitly based their ideas on ALGOL60 and static scoping. And there are follower languages which successfully combine object-orientation and static binding. The present article demonstrates that the implementation problems around the especially flexible and useful concept of many level or skew prefixing (inheritance) can well be solved, shown by LOGLAN'88, an extension of Simula 67. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.