Abstract
It is generally considered that object-oriented (OO) languages provide weaker support for generic programming (GP) as compared with functional languages such as Haskell or SML. There were several comparative studies which showed this. But many new object-oriented languages have appeared in recent years. Have they improved the support for generic programming? And if not, is there a reason why OO languages yield to functional ones in this respect? In the earlier comparative studies object-oriented languages were usually not treated in any special way. However, the OO features affect language facilities for GP and a style people write generic programs in such languages. In this paper we compare ten modern object-oriented languages and language extensions with respect to their support for generic programming. It has been discovered that every of these languages strictly follows one of the two approaches to constraining type parameters. So the first design challenge we consider is “which approach is better”. It turns out that most of the explored OO languages use the less powerful one. The second thing that has a big impact on the expressive power of a programming language is language support for multiple models. We discuss pros and cons of this feature and its relation to other language facilities for generic programming.
Highlights
Almost all modern programming languages provide language support for generic programming (GP) [2]
We argue that OO languages are to be treated separately, because they support the distinctive OO features that pure functional languages do not, such as inheritance, interfaces/traits, subtype polymorphism, etc
We identify the dependencies between major language features, detect incompatible ones, and point the properties that a language design should satisfy to be effective for generic programming
Summary
Almost all modern programming languages provide language support for generic programming (GP) [2]. There were several studies that compared language support for generic programming in different languages [3,4,5,6] These studies do not make any difference between object-oriented and functional languages. We argue that OO languages are to be treated separately, because they support the distinctive OO features that pure functional languages do not, such as inheritance, interfaces/traits, subtype polymorphism, etc These features affect the language design and a way people write generic programs in object-oriented languages. Several independent extensions have been developed for the mainstream OO languages [7,8,9,10] These new languages and extensions have many differences, but all of them tend to improve the support for generic programming. We identify the dependencies between major language features, detect incompatible ones, and point the properties that a language design should satisfy to be effective for generic programming
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