Waitomo: Web-Programming with Objects and Interfaces

September 15, 2006
Peter Thiemann | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany

Waitomo is an experimental programming language derived from Java. It aims to strengthen the guarantees of type safety by eliminating the need for casting without sacrificing the flexibility of the object-oriented programming style. The vital ingredients of the language are generics combined with a new approach to interfaces that includes a notion of self-types and union types. Waitomo interfaces are not types, but rather constraints which can be imposed on generics. This choice enables elegant solutions to standard programming problems.

Besides an introduction to the language, the paper contains the full formalization of a core language with proofs of type soundness and decidability of subtyping. A prototype implementation of the language exists.

Speaker Details

Peter Thiemann received his PhD in Informatics in 1991 from Tübingen University in Germany. In 1998 he spent a year as a lecturer in Nottingham before becoming a professor at Freiburg university, Germany, in 1999. His research interests lie in the area of programming languages and semantics and include program analysis, type systems, language-based security, partial evaluation, Web programming, and language design.