Introduction to the special issue of the sigplan notices on the object-oriented programming workshop

Abstract

Collectively, these papers provide a snapshot of current research in object-oriented programming that touches on many interesting research issues. In preparing this overview we discovered interesting relations among papers, such as the fact that compiling from an object-oriented language into CP and actors are quite similar in their objective, and that three seemingly different papers were concerned with different aspects of whether inheritance should be at the level of types or instances. Object-oriented programming clearly holds promise as a framework for programming in the large that can be extended to concurrency, databases, and knowledge bases. This workshop and this collection of papers contribute to an understanding of what needs to be done to turn this promise into a reality.