Department of Computer Science
University of Chicago
2pm 28 November 2003
Room 2511, JCMB, King's Buildings
Traits are mechanisms, recently proposed by Scharli et al, for factoring Smalltalk class hierarchies. By separating the issue of code reuse from the inheritance hierarchy, traits allow one to avoid problems with methods defined too high in the inheritance hierarchy while sharing common implementation. Early experience with traits in Smalltalk suggests that traits are an effective way to implement class hierarchies. Kathleen Fisher and I have been exploring the question of how to add traits to a statically-typed class-based language, such as Moby or Java. In this talk, I will describe the mechanism of traits and our first steps towards the foundations of typed traits.