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Negative Variables and the Essence of Object-Oriented Programming

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Specification, Algebra, and Software

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8373))

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zurich, Switzerland

    Bertrand Meyer

  2. Eiffel Software, Santa Barbara, USA

    Bertrand Meyer & Alexander Kogtenkov

  3. ITMO National Research University, Saint Petersburg, USA

    Bertrand Meyer & Alexander Kogtenkov

Authors
  1. Bertrand Meyer
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  2. Alexander Kogtenkov
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Network and Information, Senshu University, 2-1-1 Higashi-mita, Tama-ku, 214-8580, Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan

    Shusaku Iida

  2. Department of Computer Science, Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, MC 258, 61801, Urbana, IL, USA

    José Meseguer

  3. School of Information Science, Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), 1-1 Asahidai, 923-1292, Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan

    Kazuhiro Ogata

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Meyer, B., Kogtenkov, A. (2014). Negative Variables and the Essence of Object-Oriented Programming. In: Iida, S., Meseguer, J., Ogata, K. (eds) Specification, Algebra, and Software. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8373. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-54623-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-54624-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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