Masked types for sound object initialization

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Masked types for sound object initialization

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Annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages archive
Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages table of contents

Savannah, GA, USA

SESSION: TYPES I table of contents

Pages 53-65

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-379-2

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Authors

Xin Qi	Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Andrew C. Myers	Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

This paper presents a type-based solution to the long-standing problem of object initialization. Constructors, the conventional mechanism for object initialization, have semantics that are surprising to programmers and that lead to bugs. They also contribute to the problem of null-pointer exceptions, which make software less reliable. Masked types are a new type-state mechanism that explicitly tracks the initialization state of objects and prevents reading from uninitialized fields. In the resulting language, constructors are ordinary methods that operate on uninitialized objects, and no special default value (null) is needed in the language. Initialization of cyclic data structures is achieved with the use of conditionally masked types. Masked types are modular and compatible with data abstraction. The type system is presented in a simplified object calculus and is proved to soundly prevent reading from uninitialized fields. Masked types have been implemented as an extension to Java, in which compilation simply erases extra type information. Experience using the extended language suggests that masked types work well on real code.

REFERENCES

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