Towards a Type Theory for Active Objects：（对活动对象的类型理论）.pdfVIP

Towards a Type Theory for Active Objects 1 Oscar Nierstrasz Michael Papathomas 2 Abstract Currently popular notions of types, such as signature compatibility, fail to express essential prop- erties of concurrent active objects that are necessary for their correct use in new contexts. We pro- pose and explore a new notion of compatibility called interaction conformance defined in terms of the possible interactions between an object and its clients. We relate interaction conformance to known equivalence relations between communicating concurrent agents, and we show that, by viewing types as certain kinds of indeterminate agents, interaction conformance gives us a sub- type relationship. We briefly explore the potential for applying these ideas to concurrent object- oriented languages. 1 Introduction A key property of object-oriented languages is that they promote software reuse through inter- changeability of software components that conform to the same message-passing interface. A characterization of such an interface is a type, and can be viewed as a constraint on the behaviour of an object. An object that conforms to the type meets the constraint. A subtype, in this view, is simply a stronger constraint: all objects that conform to a subtype also conform to the super- type. The nature of these constraints may vary, however, as may the rules for determining when one type is a subtype of another. The choice of characterization will depend on the computation- al model of a particular language and the way in which objects interact. We seek to develop a notion of type that will serve to characterize concurrent, active objects whose behaviour may not conform to a strict client/server model