Inheritance Management and Method Dispatch in Reeexive Object-oriented Languages

A collection of algorithms and data structures are presented which represent a generalized framework for inheritance management and method dispatch in reeexive, dynamically typed, single-receiver languages with type/implementation-paired multiple inheritance. By storing a small amount of information, the algorithms can incrementally maintain the entire dispatch environment during the four fundamental environment modiication requests { adding/removing selectors to/from classes and adding/removing class hierarchy links. By merging inheritance management, inheritance connict detection and method dispatch calculation, the algorithms are computationally eecient, and can be used to maintain dispatch information even in a reeexive environment. The algorithms are applicable to all table-based method dispatch techniques and require the use of only a few dispatch-speciic functions. A group of object-oriented classes are used to implement both the technique-independent and technique-dependent algorithms, providing a complete framework for table-based method dispatch. Although general enough to apply to reeexive languages, the framework is also useful in statically typed languages, as it incrementally computes hierarchy information needed by the compiler to establish which method addresses can be uniquely identiied during compilation. This allows compile-time optimizations instead of a runtime table look-up. The framework can and will be extended to multi-method languages.