OO languages late-binding signature

Most comparisons among OO languages focus on structural or philosophical features but rarely on dynamic ones. Beyond all these structural properties, late-binding is, to our opinion, the key property of OO paradigm; the operational consequence of inheritance use. All OO languages use late-binding, but do they all have the same interpretation? We show that the answer is no, not very surprisingly, but that almost each language has its own interpretation. We propose a simple procedure to compare latebinding interpretation of OO languages and introduce a late-binding signature of OO programming languages. This procedure can be used to study language interactions as we will show it for the Microsoft .NET framework.