Abstract

It has been pointed out that inheritance and synchronization constraints in concurrent object systems often conflict with each other, resulting in inheritance anomaly where re-definitions of inherited methods are necessary in order to maintain the integrity of concurrent objects. The anomaly is serious, as it could nullify the benefits of inheritance altogether. Several proposals have been made for resolving the anomaly; however, we argue that those proposals suffer from the incompleteness which allows room for counterexamples. We give an overview and the analysis of inheritance anomaly, and review several proposals for minimizing the unwanted effect of this phenomenon. In particular, we propose (partial) solutions using (1) computational reflection, and (2) transactions in OOCP languages. 1 Introduction Inheritance is the prime language feature in sequential OO (Object-Oriented) languages, and is especially important for code re-use. Another important feature is concurrency; although...

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