A type system for first-class layers with inheritance, subtyping, and swapping

Abstract

Context-Oriented Programming (COP) is a programming paradigm to encourage modularization of context-dependent software. Key features of COP are layers—modules to describe context-dependent behavioral variations of a software system—and their dynamic activation, which can modify the behavior of multiple objects that have already been instantiated. Typechecking programs written in a COP language is difficult because the activation of a layer can even change objects' interfaces. Inoue et al. have informally discussed how to make JCop, an extension of Java for COP by Appeltauer et al., type-safe. In this article, we formalize a small COP language called Context FJ<: with its operational semantics and type system and show its type soundness. The language models main features of the type-safe version of JCop, including dynamically activated first-class layers, inheritance of layer definitions, layer subtyping, and layer swapping.