MultiJava: Modular Symmetric Multiple Dispatch and Extensible Classes for Java
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Computer Science—the theory, representation, processing, communication and use of information—is fundamentally transforming every aspect of human endeavor. The Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University advances computational and information sciences through; 1. educational and research programs within and beyond the university; 2. active engagement to help define national and international research, and 3. educational agendas, and sustained commitment to graduating leaders for academia, industry and government.
History
The Computer Science Department was officially established in 1969, with Robert Stewart serving as the founding Department Chair. Faculty were composed of joint appointments with Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical Engineering. In 1969, the building which now houses the Computer Science department, then simply called the Computer Science building, was completed. Later it was named Atanasoff Hall. Throughout the 1980s to present, the department expanded and developed its teaching and research agendas to cover many areas of computing.
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1969-present
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
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Abstract
Multiple dispatch offers several well-known advantages over the single dispatching of conventional object-oriented languages, including a simple solution to the "binary method" problem and cleaner implementations of the "strategy" and similar design patterns. Extensible classes allow one to extend the set of methods that an existing class supports without editing that class or client code. This provides, among other idioms, a simple implementation of the "visitor" design pattern. We present MultiJava, a backward-compatible extension to Java supporting symmetric multiple dispatch and extensible classes. We adapt previous theoretical work to allow MultiJava classes to be statically typechecked modularly and safely, ruling out any link-time or run-time type errors. We also present a novel compilation scheme that operates modularly and incurs performance overhead only where multiple dispatching or extensible classes are actually used.
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Copyright © Curtis Clifton, Gary T. Leavens, Craig Chambers, and Todd Millstein, 2000