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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 thesemantics ofobjects in the sense of object-oriented programming.This paper shows that this semantics provides a smoothinterpretation for subtyping,a central notion in object-oriented programming.We show that different characterisations of behavioural subtypingfound in the literature can conveniently be expressed in coalgebraic terms.We also investigate the subtle difference between behavioural subtyping and refinement.

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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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