Type-safe Composition of Object Modules

Guruduth Banavar, Gary Lindstrom, Douglas Orr
Department of Computer Science
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
{banavar,dbo,lindstrom}@cs.utah.edu

Abstract

We describe a facility that enables routine type-checking during the linkage of external declarations and definitions of separately compiled programs in ANSI C. The primary advantage of our server-style type-checked linkage facility is the ability to program the combination of object modules via a suite of strongly typed module operators. Such programmability enables one to easily incorporate programmer-defined data format conversion stubs at link-time. In addition, our linkage facility is able to automatically generate safe coercion stubs for compatible encapsulated data.

Full paper appeared in Computer Systems and Education, Tata McGraw Hill Publishing Company, Limited, Bangalore India, N. Balakrishnan, T. Radhakrishnan, D. Sampath and S. Sundaram, editors, pp. 188-200, June 22-25, 1994. Also available as University of Utah Computer Science Technical Report UUCS-94-001.

spo@cs.utah.edu
Last modified on Fri Aug 4 1995.