Improving support for generic programming in C# with associated types and constraint propagation /

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Srinivasa Raghavan, Aravind
Other Authors: Jarvi, Jaakko (Thesis advisor)
Format: Thesis eBook
Language:English
Published: [College Station, Tex.] : [Texas A&M University], [2010]
Subjects:
Online Access:Link to OAK Trust copy
Description
Abstract:Generics has recently been adopted to many mainstream object oriented languages, such as C# and Java. As a particular design choice, generics in C# and Java use a sub-typing relation to constraint type parameters. Failing to encapsulate type parameters within generic interfaces and inability to encapsulate type constraints as part of an interface definition have been identified as deficiencies in the way this design choice has been implemented in these languages. These deficiencies can lead to verbose and redundant code. In particular, they have been reported to affect the development of highly generic libraries. To address these issues, extending object oriented interfaces and sub-typing with associated types and constraint propagation has been proposed and studied in an idealized small-scale formal setting. This thesis builds on this previous work and provides a design and implementation of the extensions in full C#. We also present a proof of soundness of the Featherweight Generic Java (FGJ) formalism extended with interfaces. This property was assumed in a proof of type safety of associated types and constraint propagation, but no proof for the property was provided.
Item Description:"Major Subject: Computer Science"
Title from author supplied metadata (automated record created 2010-03-12 12:08:51).
Electronic resource.
Physical Description:1 online resource.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references.