Traits Composable Units of Behaviour - Universit#228;t Bern.pdfVIP

Traits: Composable Units of Behaviour ¨ ´ Nathanael Scharli, Stephane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz, and Andrew P. Black Software Composition Group, University of Bern, Switzerland OGI School of Science Engineering, Oregon Health and Science University {schaerli, ducasse, oscar}@iam.unibe.ch, black@ Published in ECOOP’2003, LNCS 2743, pp. 248–274, Springer Verlag, 2003 Abstract. Despite the undisputed prominence of inheritance as the fundamental reuse mechanism in object-oriented programming languages, the main variants — single inheritance, multiple inheritance, and mixin inheritance — all suffer from conceptual and practical problems. In the first part of this paper, we identify and illustrate these problems. We then present traits, a simple compositional model for structuring object-oriented programs. A trait is essentially a group of pure methods that serves as a building block for classes and is a primitive unit of code reuse. In this model, classes are composed from a set of traits by specifying glue code that connects the traits together and accesses the necessary state. We demonstrate how traits overcome the problems arising from the different vari- ants of inheritance, we discuss how traits can be implemented effectively, and we summarize our experience applying traits to refactor an existing class hierarchy. Keywords: Inheritance, mixins, multiple inheritance, traits, reuse, Smalltalk 1 Introduction Although single inheritance is widely accepted as the sine qua non of object-orientation, programmers have long realized that single inheritance is not expressive enough to fac- tor out common features (i.e., instance variables and methods) shared by classes in a complex hierarchy. As a consequence, language designers have pro