Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Anomaly-Free Component Adaptation With Class Overriding, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Software components can be implemented and distributed as collections of classes, then adapted to the needs of specific applications by means of subclassing. Unfortunately, subclassing in collections of related classes may require re-implementation of otherwise valid classes just because they utilize outdated parent classes, a phenomenon that is referred to as the subclassing anomaly. The subclassing anomaly is a serious problem since it can void the benefits of component-based programming altogether. We propose a code adaptation language mechanism called class overriding that is intended to overcome the subclassing anomaly. Class overriding does not create new and isolated derived classes as …