Type Safety in the Context of Method Updates

摘要

This paper presents a framework for checking and maintaining type safety in the presence of method evolution. A method update often affects all components of the method, including the inter face and the implementation. The type safety problem is addressed as two levels of type consistency. The first level relates to the type checking of methods in the context of the class inheritance hierarchy, and concerns the semantics of the polymorphism of methods. The second level considers the implementation parts of methods by capturing and preserving the semantics of the chain of calling relationships among relevant methods. A graph-based approach is used to achieve this two-level type consistency required at the level of class inheritance hierarchy and the level of method invocation. We demonstrate that the two levels of type consistency checking combined provide a better control of the run-time type error problems.