A Primitive Calculus for Module Systems

Abstract

AbstractWe present a simple and powerful calculus of modules supporting mutual recursion and higher order features. The calculus allows to encode a large variety of existing mechanisms for combining software components, including parameterized modules, extension with overriding of object-oriented programming, mixin modules and extra-linguistic mechanisms like those provided by a linker. As usual, we first present an untyped version of our calculus and then a type system which is proved sound w.r.t. the reduction semantics; moreover we give a translation of other primitive calculi.KeywordsModule SystemOutput ComponentBasic ModuleReduction RuleModule LanguageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.