Informal Introduction into the Concept-Oriented Programming

This paper describes a new approach to programming, called the concept-oriented programming (COP). It is based on using a new programming construct, called concept, which generalizes conventional classes. Concepts describe behaviour of both objects and references. Hence references are completely legalized and made first-class citizens with the same rights as objects. Using concepts the programmer can easily describe custom virtual address spaces where objects will exist. The hierarchical structure of such a space is modelled by means of concept inclusion relation which generalizes class inheritance. In COP, a great deal or even most of functions are executed implicitly during object access rather than in target objects themselves. These functions have cross-cutting nature but can be effectively separated using COP.