Transposition

With the ECMA Eiffel Standard, the dynamic binding semantics of the Eiffel language are slightly changed. This puts some additional burdens on the compiler implementor. We will discuss two of them:

• The need for copying inherited features in descendants.
• More complex dynamic binding.

Transposition

We talk of transposition of a feature, when we copy an inherited feature to a descendant class and adapt its content according to the inheritance path. When all the inherited features of a class are transposed, we get the flat short form of the class. Transposition is very interesting, since it seems to be the solution to some ambiguities in the language, namely repeated inheritance and replication.

Transposition was never necessary in Eiffel compilers but it is now

For the following discussion we use this system of five classes: