ON AUTOMATIC CLASS INSERTION WITH OVERLOADING

Several algorithms [Gas92, MS89, Run92, DDHL94a, DDHL95, GMM95] have b een proposed to automatically insert a class into an inheritance hiera rchy. But actual hierarchies al include overriden and overloaded prope rties that these algorithms handle either very partially or not at all . Partially handled means handled provided there is a separate given f unction f able to compare overloaded properties [DDHL95, GMM95]. In th is paper, we describe a new version of our algorithm (named Ares) whic h handles automatic class insertion more efficiently using such a func tion f. Although impossible to fully define, this function can be comp uted for a number of well defined cases of overloading and overriding. We give a classification of such cases and describe the computation p rocess for a well-defined set of nontrivial cases. The algorithm prese rves these important properties: preservation of the maximal factoriza tion of properties preservation of the underlying structure (Galois la ttice) of the input hierarchy conservation of relevant classes of the input hierarchy with their properties.