Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Typestate

McGinniss, Iain (2014) Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Typestate. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The modelling and enforcement of typestate constraints in object oriented languages has the potential to eliminate a variety of common and difficult to diagnose errors. While the theoretical foundations of typestate are well established in the literature, less attention has been paid to the practical aspects: is the additional complexity justifiable? Can typestate be reasoned about effectively by "real" programmers? To what extent can typestate constraints be inferred, to reduce the burden of large type annotations? This thesis aims to answer these questions and provide a holistic treatment of the subject, with original contributions to both the theorical and practical aspects of typestate.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: typestate, programming language design, type theory, type inference
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Supervisor's Name: Gay, Dr. Simon and Sventek, Professor Joe
• Date of Award: 2014
• Depositing User: Dr Iain McGinniss
• Unique ID: glathesis:2014-5244
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 15 Oct 2014 08:24
• Last Modified: 15 Oct 2014 08:33
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/5244