Type Safety in the Context of Method Updates

Authors: Tari Z.¹; Li X.²; Liu L.³

Source: Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Volume 13, Number 3, 12 November 1999 , pp. 279-298(20)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

This paper presents a framework for checking and maintaining type safety in the presence of method evolution. A method update often affects all components of the method, including the inter face and the implementation. The type safety problem is addressed as two levels of type consistency. The first level relates to the type checking of methods in the context of the class inheritance hierarchy, and concerns the semantics of the polymorphism of methods. The second level considers the implementation parts of methods by capturing and preserving the semantics of the chain of calling relationships among relevant methods. A graph-based approach is used to achieve this two-level type consistency required at the level of class inheritance hierarchy and the level of method invocation. We demonstrate that the two levels of type consistency checking combined provide a better control of the run-time type error problems.

Keywords: object-oriented databases; schema update; schema consistency; type safety

Language: English

Document Type: Regular paper

Affiliations: 1: Department of Computer Science, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. zahirt@cs.rmit.edu.au 2: School of Information Systems and Management, The University of New South Wales, Australia. xueli@unsw.edu.au 3: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Oregon Graduate Institute, USA. lingliu@cse.ogi.edu

Publication date: 1999-11-12