Objects, Processes, Capabilities and Orthogonal Persistence in Timor

Speaker: Les Keedy, University of Ulm

When: 11:00, Monday, 13 September 2004

Venue: 78-420

Conventional programming languages place durable information in files which are held in a file system. This requires the programmer to use constructs for handling computational data structures which are quite different from those for managing data structures which outlive the execution of the program. The consequent disadvantages include a duplication of mechanisms, greater complexity both of programming languages and the systems which implement and support them, and greater difficulties in teaching and learning programming languages.

Orthogonal persistence aims to unify the constructs used for programming computational and durable data structures into a single form and thus eliminate such disadvantages. Standard object oriented programming languages either do not support orthogonal persistence at all, or only in a relatively visible way (e.g. via object serialisation in Java).

Timor is a new object oriented and component oriented programming language which adopts an unusually simple approach to orthogonal persistence whereby all objects are naturally persistent.

The seminar explains how this is achieved first by describing the Timor concept of an object and a process/thread. It then shows how Timor's capability concept (similar to operating system capabilities) allows orthogonal persistence to be defined for all objects (without requiring that all objects have capabilities).

An interesting outcome of the approach is that Timor is not only an OO programming language but also provides all that is necessary for programming OO database systems.

Hospitality: Paul Bailes

Contact: Phil Cook (SSE seminar co-ordinator) (philc@itee.uq.edu.au)

SSE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~sse/Seminars.html