| TR#: | LPCR9507 |
| Class: | LPCR |
| Title: | ENVIRONMENTAL ACQUISITION - A
NEW INHERITANCE MECHANISM. |
| Authors: | J. Gil and D. Lorenz |
| PostScript | LPCR9507.ps.gz - LPCR9507.ps |
| LPCR9507.pdf | |
| Abstract: | Nature vs. Nurture? The debate has obsessed the minds of psychologists and philosophers for many years. However, for the object-orienteer, it has never been a problem: an object {\em inherits} all of its properties. In this work we ask if an object should not be subject to environmental effects. We answer this question in the affirmative by demonstrating many cases in which the character of an object must be affected by the environment it is put in. We present a new abstraction mechanism - {\em Environmental Acquisition} - which allows a component to inherit properties from its enclosing composite(s). The need for environmental acquisition is demonstrated in several application domains. It is shown that the absence of environmental acquitision may lead to the creating of cumbersome programs. We propose a strongly typed model for environmental acquisition that allows static type checking of programs exploiting this mechanism, and compare it to several other mechanisms including ordinary inheritance and delegation. |
| Copyright | The above paper is copyright by the Technion, Author(s), or others. Please contact the author(s) for more information |
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