Instructor's Guide: Polymorphism

Rationale

This chapter treats polymorphism from a foundational perspective. It characterizes abstract inheritance as employed in knowledge representation and proceeds with a formal definition of the subtype relation, culminating in a family of calculi for a type theoretical analysis of the constructs employed in object-oriented programming. The features studied include generic types, overloading, data hiding and self-references.

Hints

The sections introducing the various type calculi cover advanced topics and require some background in logic and deductive systems.

Project assignments

Due to the formal background needed, the project assignments listed below have the flavor of research projects and must be considered for advanced students only. Possible assignments are

designing a language incorporating both knowledge representation features and objects,
the development of a type calculus for a concrete programming language, such as Smalltalk, Eiffel, C++, or Java
the development of a type checker for a variety of polymorphic constructs.

Since some of this work has already be done (see below), one may simply advise students to study these efforts.

Comments

To gain practical experience with the typing of objects and functions, students may use the fomega tool or the BOPL type checker described in [Palsberg94].

[] readme course(s) preface I 1 2 II 3 4 III 5 6 7 IV 8 9 10 V 11 12 afterthought(s) appendix reference(s) example(s) resource(s) _

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