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European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

ECOOP 1998: ECOOP’98 — Object-Oriented Programming pp 158–185Cite as

Flexible alias protection

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1445))

Abstract

Aliasing is endemic in object oriented programming. Because an object can be modified via any alias, object oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyse. Flexible alias protection is a conceptual model of inter-object relationships which limits the visibility of changes via aliases, allowing objects to be aliased but mitigating the undesirable effects of aliasing. Flexible alias protection can be checked statically using programmer supplied aliasing modes and imposes no runtime overhead. Using flexible alias protection, programs can incorporate mutable objects, immutable values, and updatable collections of shared objects, in a natural object oriented programming style, while avoiding the problems caused by aliasing.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Institute, Macquarie University, Sydney

    James Noble & John Potter

  2. Object Systems Group, Université de Genève, Geneva

    Jan Vitek

Authors
  1. James Noble
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  2. Jan Vitek
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  3. John Potter
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Editor information

Eric Jul

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Noble, J., Vitek, J., Potter, J. (1998). Flexible alias protection. In: Jul, E. (eds) ECOOP’98 — Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054091

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054091

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64737-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69064-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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