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Sunday
Aug292004

Object-Z is not a 'pure' Object Oriented Language

Alena Griffiths and Gordon Rose [in University of Queensland SVRC Technical Report 95-38, 1995, section 3.1.1] state:

The development of Object-Z as an extension of Z pollutes the "object-orientedness" of Object-Z insofar as it complicates the type structure with types other than classes.
By this, they presumably mean that the integers, sequences, cartesian products, and so on, of Z are not classes. Though this is rather obvious, it had not occurred to me until I read Griffiths and Rose's paper. It means that Object-Z is what Bertrand Meyer would call a hybrid 'object-based' language (like C++ and Ada) rather than a 'truly object-oriented' language like Smalltalk or Eiffel.  This then leads one to ask what a 'truly object-oriented' specification language would look like.  Presumably it would have all  the advantages of simplicity and orthogonality that Smalltalk and Eiffel have over C++ and Ada.  What we really need is a specification language in which the object oriented features arise naturally from the logic and are not cobbled on, almost as an after thought, as they are in Object-Z, Z++ and other object oriented specification languages.

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