Toward Pure Polylingual Persistence

Kaplan, Alan D.; Ridgway, John V. E.; Schmerl, Bradley; Sridhar, Krishnan; Wileden, Jack C.

doi:10.1007/3-540-45498-5_7

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Our own previous work on pragmatic approaches includes the PolySPIN framework [5,6], and implementations of it called PolySPINner [3,2]. This work suffered from a lack of formal underpinnings and a concomitant failure to adequately address fundamental typing issues.…”

Section: Related and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning About Multi-Lingual Exception Handling Using RIPLS

Ridgway

Wileden²

2008

Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science

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Building multi-lingual software is a practical necessity. At present, with object-oriented programming the dominant paradigm, it is common to assemble software systems comprising components written in at least two different object-oriented languages. Modern object-oriented languages provide exception handling mechanisms as a means of enriching the signatures of methods with a specification of what to do if the method "fails", i.e., cannot carry out its intended (normal) function for some reason. Indeed, Java and C++ (and many other object-oriented languages, including C#) have remarkably similar exception handling mechanisms. As we demonstrate, however, those exception handling mechanisms do not necessarily interoperate smoothly when used in multi-lingual software systems. We believe that our long-term goal of maximally effortless and error-free multi-lingual programming requires automated tools that are based on solid formal foundations. Toward that end, we have developed a formal language, which we call RIPLS, that can be used to rigorously study properties of multilingual software. In this paper, we demonstrate RIPLS and our approach by using it to study exception handling in multilingual object-oriented systems, and show how use of our methods can identify problems that standard techniques cannot. We then exhibit a correctly-working version of multi-lingual exception-handling and use our methods to confirm its correctness. Finally we discuss how experience with these RIPLS-based methods has informed our designs for automated tools that will implement correctly-working multi-lingual exception handling. This work makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that formal, theoretical foundations can be used to solve practical problems in multi-lingual software development.

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Section: Related and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning About Multi-Lingual Exception Handling Using RIPLS

Ridgway

Wileden²

2008

Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science

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“…A framework for the analysis and design of polylingual interoperable systems is given in [4] [5]. This framework has two objectives.…”

Section: Principles Of Polylingual Interoperabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of large-scale polylingual systems

Grechanik¹,

Batory²,

Perry³

Proceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Building systems from existing applications written in two or more languages is common practice. Such systems are polylingual. Polylingual systems are relatively easy to build when the number of APIs needed to achieve language interoperability is small. However, when the number of distinct APIs become large, maintaining and evolving polylingual systems becomes a notoriously difficult task.In this paper, we present a simple, practical, and effective way to develop, maintain, and evolve large-scale polylingual systems. Our approach relies on recursive type systems whose instances can be manipulated by reflection. Foreign objects (i.e. objects that are not defined in a host programming language) are abstracted as graphs and path expressions are used for accessing and manipulating data. Path expressions are implemented by type reification -turning foreign type instances into first-class objects and enabling access to and manipulation of them in a host programming language. Doing this results in multiple benefits, including coding simplicity and uniformity that we demonstrate in a complex commercial project.

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