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The power of symmetry: unifying inheritance and generative programming
Hutchins D.  Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (Companion of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference, Anaheim, CA, USA, Oct 26-30, 2003)38-52.2003.Type:Proceedings
Date Reviewed: Jan 26 2004

The author describes a programming language, Ohmu, as well as an object-oriented (OO) model of the same name, which unifies the concepts of functions, classes, instances, templates, and aspects into a single construct, the structure. If one considers that the first idea of OO languages was to extend and generalize the idea of a structure, this is a fortunate simplification. What I find to be the most interesting idea is that by choosing various binding times for parameters, one can specialize constructs in various ways, and obtain the same capabilities that are currently obtained using many different and restricted constructs.

One of the consequences is that the programmer no longer needs to know what is done at compile time and what is done at runtime. Another one is a generalization of the type concept, which finally encompasses objects and values.

In fact, if the paper had not been presented to OOPSLA, it could have avoided using the full range of OO terminology. That would make it more acceptable outside of this community. It could be interesting also to note that some of the ideas presented here could be traced back, for example, to the Euler language [1] in 1966, as well as other languages of the same period. But none of the references in this paper is older than 1987.

Reviewer:  O. Lecarme Review #: CR128990 (0407-0826)
1) Wirth, N.; Weber, H. EULER: a generalization of ALGOL and its formal definition: Part 1. 9, 1 (1966), 1325.
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