Mechanical generation of robust class hierarchies

Reusability has been the main promise object-oriented programming gave to software developers. However, it turned out that object-oriented programming did not bring up measurably more reuse than modular programming. One reason for this was that inheritance had never been examined in detail which introduced unexpected exceptions. In (Zimmerman et al., 1996) this examination had been done at first. Since then it was possible to give rules for the correct use or the misuse of polymorphism. Zimmerman showed further how robust class hierarchies can be constructed. This paper describes a method for the specification and generation of robust hierarchies along a certain set of properties.