lightweight scalable components
One limitation of the well-known family polymorphism approach is that each "family" will be a large monolithic program. In this paper, we introduce a minimal lightweight set of language features that treat each member of a family as a reusable programming unit, while preserving the important feature of scalability. The only one language construct we propose in this paper is type parameter members , which allows type parameters to be referred from the outside of class declarations. To investigate properties of type parameter members in the real programming language settings, we develop a programming language Scalable Java (SJ), an extension of Java generics with type parameter members. To carefully investigate the type soundness of SJ, we develop FGJ#, a core calculus of this extension based on FGJ, a functional core of Java with generics. Furthermore, to explore how to implement this proposal, we define the erasure of FGJ# programs as an extension of the erasure of FGJ programs, which compiles SJ to Java without generics.
type parameter members scalable java fgj pamily polymorphism parametric polymorphism