Chapter 5

Instructors' Guide


Ch 1 Ch 2 Ch 3 Ch 4 Ch 5 Ch 6 Ch 7 Ch 8 Ch 9 Ch 10 Ch 11 Ch 12
  1. Object-oriented languages generally offer a facility for creating objects, the capability of message passing, classes and inheritance. See slide 5-classification.
  2. A classification of object-oriented languages may distinguish between hybrid languages, frame-based languages as employed in artificial intelligence, parallel/distributed languages and languages supporting prototypes. See slide 5-classification.
  3. Characteristic for the object model supported by C++ is the unification of classes with the struct record type. See slide 5-structure.
  4. Friends may be classes or functions. They are allowed access to the private parts of an object. They may be necessary for reasons of efficiency. Friends are a relatively safe feature, since they must explicitly be declared by the class itself. They are not inherited. Neither is it possible for a class or function to declare itself as a friend of a class. Nevertheless, friends may jeopardize the integrity of an object. Treat friends with care.
  5. Object-based implies support for encapsulation, whereas object-oriented implies support for encapsulation and inheritance. See slide 5-object-based.
  6. As orthogonal dimensions along which to describe the design of object-oriented languages you may distinguish between objects, types, delegation and abstraction. See slide 5-orthogonal.
  7. Active objects are, basically, objects with threads. Synchronous active objects, as supported by sC++, support method call by rendez-vous, protecting the object from unsafe access. Active objects may be used instead of event-loops and callbacks, thus avoiding the need to merge multiple event-loops. See section Active.
  8. Prototype-based languages support an object model based on exemplars. Their most characteristic feature is support for dynamic delegation.
  9. Inheritance is static; it amounts to creation-time sharing, whereas delegation supports lifetime sharing. See slide 5-prototypes.

    Both C++ and Java support the forwarding of member function calls. Forwarding does not, however, allow for binding self-reference to the forwarding object.

  10. In classical object-oriented languages, the notion of class stands for object generator and interface description. A class may further be a repository for sharing resources and act as an object capable of answering (class) methods. See slide 5-class.
  11. See slide meta-architecture.
  12. The first three postulates given in slide 5-postulates pertain to Smalltalk. With some minor modifications, these postulates hold for other classical languages. The fourth postulate of slide 5-postulates specifies the constraint that must be met by a reflective architecture: class variables of an object must be instance variables of the class of the object (when considering the class as an object).

slide: Answers