Abstract

Within the object-oriented paradigm the world consists of a collection of entities having low coupling, called “objects”, each dealing with a specific task. Coordination and communication takes place via sending of messages. Objects are grouped into “classes” which determinate (among other things) the interface to the outside world (of the objects belonging to the class). The general complaint on the object-oriented paradigm is that it lacks a proper formal foundation. One of the aims of this work is to show that final (terminal) coalgebras may serve as a formal basis for object semantics in a similar way to the way initial algebras serve as a formal basis for abstract data types.

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