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A Coalgebraic Semantics of Subtyping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2002

Erik Poll
Erik Poll*
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, University of Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
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Abstract

Coalgebras have been proposed as formal basis for the semantics of objects in the sense of object-oriented programming. This paper shows that this semantics provides a smooth interpretation for subtyping, a central notion in object-oriented programming. We show that different characterisations of behavioural subtyping found in the literature can conveniently be expressed in coalgebraic terms. We also investigate the subtle difference between behavioural subtyping and refinement.

Keywords

Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications , Volume 35 , Issue 1: Coalgebraic Methods in Computer Science , January 2001 , pp. 61 - 81
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, 2001

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