Patent ID: 7840939
Filing Date: 2010-11-23
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A computer readable storage medium having instructions encoded thereon for implementing a method for managing annotation inheritance in an object-oriented program, comprising: (a) identifying a class-level annotation applied to modify a class; (b) associating the identified class-level annotation with each member declared within the class; (c) identifying a member-level annotation applied to modify a first member declared within the class, wherein the first member is not inherited from any superclass of the class; (d) associating the identified member-level annotation with the first member to which the member-level annotation is applied, wherein the member-level annotation supersedes the class-level annotation associated with the first member when the member-level annotation and the class-level annotation are of a common type; (e) identifying a second member of the class that is inherited from any given superclass, the second member being neither hidden nor overridden; and (f) in the class, maintaining association of one or more annotations having been associated with the second member in its superclass, wherein implementation of the method includes either performing operations (a), (b), (c), and (d) without performing operations (e) and (f), or includes performing operations (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), and (f).