Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date: Friday, Nov. 24, 2000
Time: 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]
Speaker: Dominique Colnet, Université Henri Poincaré (Nancy 1) & LORIA
Description: "Match-O: a dialect of Eiffel with match-types"


                        Abstract



It is well known that the Eiffel language allows covariant
redefinition.  Regardless of system-level validity rules, Eiffel is
not type safe.  In this talk, we present a dialect of Eiffel called
Match-O, which prohibits covariant redefinition.  We introduce a new
kind of types, the match-types, inspired by the papers of Kim Bruce.
The scope of this project is many-fold: allowing binary methods;
keeping sound ``mytype method specialization'', i.e. anchored type
using Current; allowing subtyping in all other sound cases.  We claim
that match-types can be added in the Eiffel type system to eliminate
type unsoundness without blocking many interesting Eiffel programs
(e.g. the ones with ``binary methods'').  We have implemented a
compiler for Match-O and we have experimented with our dialect on a
large system using the original source code of SmallEiffel itself.

Biography

Dominique Colnet is ``Maître de Conférences'' (i.e. assistant
Professor) at the University Henri Poincaré (Nancy 1) in France.  He
is the main author of ``SmallEiffel, The GNU Eiffel Compiler''.
Dominique Colnet is a member of the LORIA lab, where he conducts
research in the field of object-oriented languages. He is one of the
authors of the French book ``Les langages à objets'', published in
1989 by InterEdition (more than 7000 copies sold). The English version
of this book, ``Object-Oriented Languages'', was published by Academic
Press in 1991.  For more than 10 years he has been teaching object
oriented programming using Eiffel as a first language at ESIAL (the
software engineering school of the University Henri Poincaré at
Nancy).  To find out more about SmallEiffel and the LORIA lab:

http://SmallEiffel.loria.fr/


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars00/dept20001124a