Research Article

Checking ownership and confinement

  1. Alex Potanin,
  2. James Noble*,
  3. Robert Biddle

Article first published online: 27 APR 2004

DOI: 10.1002/cpe.799

Issue

Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience

Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience

Special Issue: Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs

Volume 16, Issue 7, pages 671–687, June 2004

Additional Information

How to Cite

Potanin, A., Noble, J. and Biddle, R. (2004), Checking ownership and confinement. Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper., 16: 671–687. doi: 10.1002/cpe.799

Author Information

  1. School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand

*School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 27 APR 2004
  2. Article first published online: 27 APR 2004
  3. Manuscript Accepted: 13 JUN 2003

Funded by

  • Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund. Grant Number: 01-VUW-073

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Keywords:

  • aliasing;
  • uniqueness;
  • ownership;
  • confinement;
  • object-oriented programming

Abstract

A number of proposals to manage aliasing in Java-like programming languages have been advanced over the last five years. It is not clear how practical these proposals are, that is, how well they relate to the kinds of programs currently written in Java-like languages. To address this problem, we analysed heap snapshots from a corpus of Java programs. Our results indicate that object-oriented programs do in fact exhibit symptoms of encapsulation in practice, and that proposed models of uniqueness, ownership, and confinement can usefully describe the aliasing structures of object-oriented programs. Understanding the kinds of aliasing present in programs should help us to design formalisms to make explicit the kinds of aliasing implicit in object-oriented programs. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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