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Verifying traits: an incremental proof system for fine-grained reuse

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Traits have been proposed as a more flexible mechanism than class inheritance for structuring code in object-oriented programming, to achieve fine-grained code reuse. A trait originally developed for one purpose can be adapted and reused in a completely different context. Formalizations of traits have been extensively studied, and implementations of traits have started to appear in programming languages. So far, work on formally establishing properties of trait-based programs has mostly concentrated on type systems. This paper presents the first deductive proof system for a trait-based object-oriented language. If a specification of a trait can be given a priori, covering all actual usage of that trait, our proof system is modular as each trait is analyzed only once. However, imposing such a restriction may in many cases unnecessarily limit traits as a mechanism for flexible code reuse. In order to reflect the flexible reuse potential of traits, our proof system additionally allows new specifications to be added to a trait in an incremental way which does not violate established proofs. We formalize and show the soundness of the proof system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Torino, Italy

    Ferruccio Damiani

  2. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, PO Box 1080, Blindern, 0316, Oslo, Norway

    Johan Dovland & Einar Broch Johnsen

  3. Institute for Software Engineering, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany

    Ina Schaefer

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  1. Ferruccio Damiani
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  2. Johan Dovland
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  3. Einar Broch Johnsen
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  4. Ina Schaefer
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Correspondence to Einar Broch Johnsen.

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The authors of this paper are listed in alphabetical order. This work has been partially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SCHA 1635/2-1), the Italian MIUR (PRIN 2008 DISCO), the German-Italian University Centre (Vigoni program), and the EU project FP7-231620 HATS: Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models (http://www.hats-project.eu).

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Damiani, F., Dovland, J., Johnsen, E.B. et al. Verifying traits: an incremental proof system for fine-grained reuse. Form Asp Comp 26, 761–793 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-013-0278-3

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