Object Schizophrenia Problem in Object Role System Design

Filtered dispatch

“…A drawback of message forwarding is that it introduces object identity problems: The current self or this reference is not the original receiver of the message anymore for which the current method is being executed. This is typically referred to as the object schizophrenia problem [22]. There are a number of suggestions to solve certain aspects of that problem, for example by rebinding self or this to the original receiver in delegation-based languages [18,25], or by grouping delegating objects in split objects and letting them share a common object identity [4].…”

Demystifying object schizophrenia

“…The description of the example doesn't actually motivate why a certain message interpretation is expected and no indications are given how any programming language could "know" what style of dispatch to use when. Yet, Object Teams actually provides the necessary tools for achieving any desired outcome in the situation of chains of role-of-role as discussed in [10]: Since callout and callin binding are separately defined for individual methods, and since furthermore team activation can be configured individually even for specific team instances at runtime, the developer can freely combine plain forwarding and delegation. As a third option method call interception is supported (where a role intercepts external calls directed at its base), which will be discussed next.…”