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European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

ECOOP 2009: ECOOP 2009 – Object-Oriented Programming pp 269–293Cite as

Modular Visitor Components

A Practical Solution to the Expression Families Problem

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5653))

Abstract

The expression families problem can be defined as the problem of achieving reusability and composability across the components involved in a family of related datatypes and corresponding operations over those datatypes. Like the traditional expression problem, adding new components (either variants or operations) should be possible while preserving modular and static type-safety. Moreover, different combinations of components should have different type identities and the subtyping relationships between components should be preserved. By generalizing previous work exploring the connection between type-theoretic encodings of datatypes and visitors, we propose two solutions for this problem in Scala using modular visitor components. These components can be grouped into features that can be easily composed in a feature-oriented programming style to obtain customized datatypes and operations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK

    Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira

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  1. Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Sophia Drossopoulou

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Oliveira, B.C.d.S. (2009). Modular Visitor Components. In: Drossopoulou, S. (eds) ECOOP 2009 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03013-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03013-0_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03012-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03013-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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