Hello everybody

You are invited to attend the defense of my Ph.D. entitled:

"Traits -- Composing Classes from Behavioral Building Blocks" (thesis abstract below)

The defense will take place on Thursday, February 3rd, 2005 at 11:00, room 002 in the IWI building (Engehaldenstrasse 8).

After the defense, we will share a light lunch at the Cafeteria in building S14 (Schutzenmattstrasse 14). If you plan to join us for lunch, please let me know as soon as possible so that I can make sure there will be enough food.

Kind regards, Nathanael Schärli

Thesis abstract: Inheritance is well-known and accepted as a fundamental mechanism for reuse in object-oriented languages. Unfortunately, the main variants — single inheritance, multiple inheritance, and mixin inheritance—all suffer from conceptual and practical problems related to software reuse and robustness with respect to changes. In a first part of this thesis, we identify and illustrate these problems. To overcome these problems, we then present traits, a simple compositional model that extends single inheritance. A trait is essentially a (parameterized) set of methods; it serves as a behavioral building block for classes and is the primitive unit of code reuse. We develop a formal model of traits that establishes how traits can be composed to form other traits or classes, and we describe how we implemented traits in Squeak Smalltalk by bootstrapping a new language kernel. We present our experimental validation in which we apply traits to refactor parts of the Smalltalk kernel and library, and we develop a programming methodology around the usage of traits and the trait browser, the tool that we implemented to take full advantage of the availability of traits in the Squeak programming environment.

//////////////////////////////\ Nathanael Schärli Wuhrgasse 11 CH-4900 Langenthal, Switzerland Phone private: +41 62 922 61 21 Phone office: +41 31 631 35 47 Email: n.schaerli@gmx.net Web: www.iam.unibe.ch/~schaerli

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