Negative variables and the essence of object-oriented programming

Abstract

Reasoning about object-oriented programs requires an appropriate technique to reflect a fundamental "general relativity" property of the approach: every operation is relative to a current object, which changes with every qualified call; such a call needs access to the context of the client object. The notion of negative variable, discussed in this article, provides a framework for reasoning about OO programs in any semantic framework. We introduce a fundamental rule describing the semantics of object-oriented calls, its specific versions for such frameworks as axiomatic (Hoare-style) logic and denotational semantics, and its application to such problems as alias analysis and the consistency of concurrent programs. The approach has been implemented as part of a verification environment for a major object-oriented language and used to perform a number of proofs and analyses. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.