A Type System and Analysis for the Automatic Extraction and Enforcement of Design Information

Abstract

We present a new type system and associated type checker, analysis, and model extraction algorithms for automatically extracting models that capture aspects of a program’s design. Our type system enables the developer to place a token on each object; this token serves as the object’s representative during the analysis and model extraction. The polymorphism in our type system enables the use of general-purpose classes whose instances may serve different purposes in the computation; programmers may also hide the details of internal data structures by placing the same token on all of the objects in these data structures.