Metaclass compatibility
- 1 September 1989
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM SIGPLAN Notices
- Vol. 24 (10) , 305-315
- https://doi.org/10.1145/74878.74909
Abstract
Metaclasses provide control of object description, method compilation and more generally class behaviour. Consequently, they have been widely used in languages such as Smalltalk-80 or more recently CLOS by both users and implementers. Due to their powerful control of instances, careless inheritance of classes with different metaclasses can lead to unsound or inefficient implementations of instance methods. Using examples, we will pin-point these problems. Then we will introduce compatibility rules which need to be fulfilled by metaclasses of inherited classes in order to allow reasonable instance method description.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- The common Lisp object system metaobject kernel: a status reportPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1988
- Metaclasses are first class: The ObjVlisp ModelPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1987
- Encapsulation and inheritance in object-oriented programming languagesPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1986