Open Types and Bidirectional Relationships as an Alternative to Classes and Inheritance

By: Christian Heinlein

Abstract

Open types are presented as a simple yet powerful data model for statically typed procedural and object-oriented programming languages, that overcomes the limitations of the traditional record-oriented model. The basic idea is to separate type definitions from the definitions of their attributes in order to allow incremental definitions of the latter. Furthermore, bidirectional relationships are introduced as pairs of mutually inverse attributes whose values will be kept consistent automatically.

Cite as:

Christian Heinlein, “Open Types and Bidirectional Relationships as an Alternative to Classes and Inheritance”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 6, no. 3 (March 2007), pp. 101-151, doi:10.5381/jot.2007.6.3.a3.

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The JOT Journal   |   ISSN 1660-1769   |   DOI 10.5381/jot   |   AITO   |   Open Access   |    Contact