Object identity and dynamic recomposition of components

Dynamic recomposition of components in a program imposes advanced requirements on the expressive power of object-oriented programming languages. For example, the replacement of a component with another reveals consistency problems stemming from the fact that the concept of object identity tries to fulfil the distinct purposes of reference and comparison. By clearly separating the two notions and providing means to manipulate them independently, the consistency problems can completely be avoided. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how consistency problems arising from dynamic recomposition of software components can be solved by a novel approach of dealing with object identity in an object-oriented programming language.