Generalisation is common in object-oriented modelling. It would be useful in many situations also as a language mechanism, reverse inheritance, but there have been only few detailed proposals for that. This paper defines reverse inheritance as a true inverse of ordinary inheritance, without changing anything else in the language. Eiffel is perhaps the most suitable language for that purpose because of its flexible inheritance principles. Moreover, there exists good previous work on Eiffel, on which we have built. We describe the most important aspects of our extension, whose details proved to be more difficult than we had assumed. It would be easier if some modifications were made to Eiffel’s ordinary inheritance, or if one designed a new language. Finally, we present an implementation in which reverse inheritance is changed to ordinary inheritance by automatic transformations, thus no compiler modifications are needed.
@InProceedings{Sakkinen2009SPLST,
author = {Markku Sakkinen and Philippe Lahire and Ciprian-Bogdan Chirila},
title = {Towards Fully-fledged Reverse Inheritance in {E}iffel},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of 11th Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools SPLST 09 and 7th Nordic Workshop on Model Driven Software Engineering NW-MODE 09},
pages = {132--146},
address = {Tampere, Finland},
year = {2009},
}
[Sakkinen2009SPLST] - Markku Sakkinen, Philippe Lahire, Ciprian-Bogdan Chirila. Towards Fully-fledged Reverse Inheritance in Eiffel, In Proceedings of 11th Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools SPLST 09 and 7th Nordic Workshop on Model Driven Software Engineering NW-MODE 09, pp. 132-146, ISBN 978-952-15-2212-3, Tampere, Finland, 26-28 august, 2009
[Sakkinen2009SPLST] - Markku Sakkinen, Philippe Lahire, Ciprian-Bogdan Chirila. Towards Fully-fledged Reverse Inheritance in Eiffel, In Proceedings of 11th Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools SPLST 09 and 7th Nordic Workshop on Model Driven Software Engineering NW-MODE 09, pp. 132-146, ISBN 978-952-15-2212-3, Tampere, Finland, 26-28 august, 2009