Lambda the Ultimate

ENVIRONMENTAL ACQUISITION - A NEW INHERITANCE MECHANISM. J. Gil and D. Lorenz. Technion Tech. Report LPCR9507

Nature vs. Nurture? The debate has obsessed the minds of psychologists and philosophers for many years. However, for the object-orienteer, it has never been a problem: an object inherits all of its properties. In this work we ask if an object should not be subject to environmental effects. We answer this question in the affirmative by demonstrating many cases in which the character of an object must be affected by the environment it is put in. We present a new abstraction mechanism - Environmental Acquisition - which allows a component to inherit properties from its enclosing composite(s). The need for environmental acquisition is demonstrated in several application domains. It is shown that the absence of environmental acquitision may lead to the creating of cumbersome programs. We propose a strongly typed model for environmental acquisition that allows static type checking of programs exploiting this mechanism, and compare it to several other mechanisms including ordinary inheritance and delegation.

I don't have the time to read this right now, but the first few pages seem interesting (and I like some work from the same authors, which I did read).

The relation to Zope (see the Byte column by Udell) is interesting. Can anyone elaborate on this?

Posted to OOP by Ehud Lamm on 4/17/02; 12:27:28 PM