Modelling Objects in PICT

For the development of present-day applications, programming languages supporting high order abstractions are needed. These high order abstractions are called components. Since most of the currently available programming languages and systems fail to provide sufficient support for specifying and implementing components, we are developing a new language suitable for software composition. It is not clear how such a language will look like, what kind of abstractions it must support, and what kind of formal model it will be based on. Object-oriented programming languages address some of the needs of present-day applications, and it is therefore obvious to integrate some of their concepts and abstractions in the language. As a first step towards such an integration, we have to define an object model. Since no generally accepted formal object model exists, we have chosen the Pi-calculus as a basis for modelling. In order to find a suitable object model, we have built up an object modelling workbench for Pict, an implementation of an asynchronous Pi-calculus. In this work, we define a first abstract object model, describe several implementations of the object model in Pict, and discuss interesting features and possible extensions.

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