Integrating coercion with subtyping and multiple dispatch

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Integrating coercion with subtyping and multiple dispatch

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Symposium on Applied Computing archive
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing table of contents

Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil

SESSION: Object-oriented programming languages and systems table of contents

Pages 166-170

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-59593-753-7

Authors

J. J. Hallett	Boston University
Victor Luchangco	Sun Microsystems
Sukyoung Ryu	Sun Microsystems
Guy L. Steele, Jr.	Sun Microsystems

Sponsor

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 7, Downloads (12 Months): 40, Citation Count: 0

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ABSTRACT

Coercion can greatly improve the readability of programs, especially in arithmetic expressions. However, coercion interacts with other features of programming languages, particularly subtyping and overloaded functions and operators, in ways that can produce surprising behavior. We study examples of such surprising behavior in existing languages. This study informs the design of the coercion mechanism of Fortress, an object-oriented language with multiple dynamic dispatch, multiple inheritance and user-defined coercion. We describe this design and show how its restrictions on overloaded declarations prevent ambiguous calls due to coercion.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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