Testing Type Consistency of Method Schemas

Hiroyuki SEKI  Yasunori ISHIHARA  Hiroki DODO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E81-D   No.3   pp.278-287
Publication Date: 1998/03/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Software Theory
Keyword: 
object-oriented programming,  method schema,  base method,  user method,  consistency,  

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Summary: 
Method schemas were proposed as a formal model of object-oriented languages. A method schema S is called consistent if, for each method invocation during the execution of S, a method definition to be bound to the invoked method name is uniquely determined. However, the consistency testing problem is known to be undecidable in general. This paper presents an algorithm which analyzes the consistency of a given method schema. The algorithm decides the consistency problem in polynomial time for monadic method schemas. We also provide an incremental algorithm for testing consistency after updates of a method schema.