Logical foundations of object-oriented and frame-based languages

TLDR

Object‑oriented and frame‑based languages share features such as object identity, inheritance, polymorphic types, and encapsulation, and F‑logic is positioned analogously to how classical predicate calculus underpins relational programming. The authors introduce Frame Logic (F‑logic), a formalism that declaratively captures most structural aspects of object‑oriented and frame‑based languages. F‑logic is defined by a model‑theoretic semantics and a sound, complete resolution‑based proof theory, directly represents core object‑oriented concepts, and the paper examines semantic issues of a deductive object‑oriented language based on a subset of F‑logic.

Abstract

We propose a novel formalism, called Frame Logic (abbr., F-logic), that accounts in a clean and declarative fashion for most of the structural aspects of object-oriented and frame-based languages. These features include object identity, complex objects, inheritance, polymorphic types, query methods, encapsulation, and others. In a sense, F-logic stands in the same relationship to the object-oriented paradigm as classical predicate calculus stands to relational programming. F-logic has a model-theoretic semantics and a sound and complete resolution-based proof theory. A small number of fundamental concepts that come from object-oriented programming have direct representation in F-logic; other, secondary aspects of this paradigm are easily modeled as well. The paper also discusses semantic issues pertaining to programming with a deductive object-oriented language based on a subset of F-logic.