Section: Research Program

Object-oriented programming and logical time

We formalize in the past object-oriented programming features and safe static type systems featuring delegation-based or trait inheritance: well typed program will never produce into the message-not-found infamous run-time error. We view the logical time as a means to enhance the description of timing constraints and properties on top of existing language semantics. When considering general purpose object-oriented languages, like Java, Type Theory is a natural way to provide such properties. Currently, few languages have special types to manage instants, time structures and instant relations like subclocking, precedence, causality, equality, coincidence, exclusion, independence, etc. CCSL provides ad-hoc constructors to specify clock constraints and logical time: enriching object-oriented type theories with CCSL expressions could constitute an interesting research perspective towards a wider usage of CCSL. The new challenge is to consider logical time constraints as behavioral type properties, and the design of programming language constructs and ad-hoc type systems. Advances of typed-calculi featuring those static time features will be applied to our extension [42] of the lambda-calculus of objects of Fisher-Honsell-Mitchell.