NOOL 2015

Proposal for an Object-Oriented Multiple Dispatch Mechanism

Although multiple dispatch is recognized to be a very useful tool to properly solve difficult programming problems such as those resulting from binary methods, the large majority of existing object-oriented programming languages still don’t support it. The few ones that provide such a mechanism do so in ways that either lie outside object-oriented modular construct (class), or possess some other limitations. In this short paper a new object-oriented language mechanism for multiple dispatch is presented (using Java as the base language) that is completely integrated within existing OO language constructs, and provides a simple, expressive, and generic programming dispatch tool.