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Lazy Behavioral Subtyping

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FM 2008: Formal Methods (FM 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5014))

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Abstract

Late binding allows flexible code reuse but complicates formal reasoning significantly, as a method call’s receiver class is not statically known. This is especially true when programs are incrementally developed by extending class hierarchies. This paper develops a novel method to reason about late bound method calls. In contrast to traditional behavioral subtyping, reverification is avoided without restricting method overriding to fully behavior-preserving redefinition. The approach ensures that when analyzing the methods of a class, it suffices to consider that class and its superclasses. Thus, the full class hierarchy is not needed, and incremental reasoning is supported. We formalize this approach as a calculus which lazily imposes context-dependent subtyping constraints on method definitions. The calculus ensures that all method specifications required by late bound calls remain satisfied when new classes extend a class hierarchy. The calculus does not depend on a specific program logic, but the examples in the paper use a Hoare-style proof system. We show soundness of the analysis method.

This research is partially funded by the EU project IST-33826 CREDO: Modeling and analysis of evolutionary structures for distributed services (http://credo.cwi.nl).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

    Johan Dovland, Einar Broch Johnsen, Olaf Owe & Martin Steffen

Authors
  1. Johan Dovland
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  2. Einar Broch Johnsen
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  3. Olaf Owe
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  4. Martin Steffen
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Editor information

Jorge Cuellar Tom Maibaum Kaisa Sere

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dovland, J., Johnsen, E.B., Owe, O., Steffen, M. (2008). Lazy Behavioral Subtyping. In: Cuellar, J., Maibaum, T., Sere, K. (eds) FM 2008: Formal Methods. FM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5014. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68237-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68237-0_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68235-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68237-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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