Grace's Inheritance
Abstract
This article is an apologia for the design of inheritance in the Grace educational programming language: it explains how the design of Grace’s inheritance draws from inheritance mechanisms in predecessor languages, and defends that design as the best of the available alternatives. For simplicity, Grace objects are generated from object constructors, like those of Emerald, Lua, and Javascript; for familiarity, the language also provides classes and inheritance, like Simula, Smalltalk and Java. The design question we address is whether or not object constructors can provide an inheritance semantics similar to classes.
Authors
James Noble, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer, Timothy JonesPublished in
The Journal of Object Technology (JOT), Volume 16, no. 2, 2017The final copy of this publication is available from the publisher.
Resources
- Author copy (PDF)
- mwh.nz/pdf/jot2017
- this page
- mwh.nz/pubs/jot2017