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COOTS '01 Paper    [COOTS '01 Tech Program Index]

Pp. 93–102 of the Proceedings
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Using Accessory Functions to Generalize Dynamic Dispatch
in Single-Dispatch Object-Oriented Languages

David Wonnacott
Department of Computer Science
Haverford College
Haverford, PA 19041
davew@cs.haverford.edu
https://www.cs.haverford.edu/people/davew

Abstract:

Object oriented languages generally include some form of dynamic dispatch; that is, in the absence of precise compile-time type information, they perform a run-time selection of the appropriate function body (or method) from a set of candidates. Existing single-dispatch languages restrict dynamic dispatch to the object receiving the message.

Such languages exhibit a conflict between the goals of providing an extensible a set of types and providing an extensible the set of operations that can be performed on these types. We show that this conflict is a consequence of the restriction of dynamic dispatch to the receiver object. We also demonstrate that this conflict can be resolved by introducing a generalized form of single dispatch (thus avoiding the complexity of multiple dispatch). On this evidence, we argue that dispatch technique should be decoupled from membership in a class and access to its representation.




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Next: Introduction

2000-12-09

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems, January 29-February 2, 2001, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Last changed: 4 Jan. 2002 ml
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