A semantics of multiple inheritance-英文文献.pdfVIP

Information and Computation 76, 138-164, 1988 A Semantics of Multiple Inheritance Luca Cardelli 1 ATT Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 1. Introduction There are two major ways of structuring data in programming languages. The first and common one, used for example in Pascal, can be said to derive from standard branches of mathematics. Data is organized as cartesian products (i.e. record types), disjoint sums (i.e. unions or variant types) and function spaces (i.e. functions and procedures). The second method can be said to derive from biology and taxonomy. Data is organized in a hierarchy of classes and subclasses, and data at any level of the hierarchy inherits all the attributes of data higher up in the hierarchy. The top level of this hierarchy is usually called the class of all objects; every datum is an object and every datum inherits the basic properties of objects, e.g. the ability to tell whether two objects are the same or not. Functions and procedures are considered as local actions of objects, as opposed to global operations acting over objects. These different ways of structuring data have generated distinct classes of programming languages, and induced different programming styles. Programming with taxonomically organized data is often called object-oriented programming, and has been advocated as an effective way of structuring programming environments, data bases, and large systems in general. The notions of inheritance and object-oriented programming first appeared in Simula 67 [Dahl 66]. In Simula, objects are grouped into classes and classes can be organized