Computing Interfaces in Java

Abstract

Investigates the separation between types and classes by putting to use a special feature of Java regarding classes, interfaces and inheritance. We propose an original method which, from a single inheritance class hierarchy, extracts a multiple inheritance interface hierarchy, which contains all the types of the original hierarchy, each class being linked to the interface representing its type. In the resulting structure, interfaces are well-organized and follow a natural multiple specialization, which would not have been possible using only the single inheritance which comes with Java. Our method is based on the use of a Galois lattice, which is a reference for the elaboration of hierarchies. We introduce and justify the need for a new algorithm that efficiently builds an essential part of the Galois lattice.