A theory of objects

by Martín Abadi

The authors take a novel approach to understanding object-oriented languages by introducing object calculi and developing a theory of objects around them. The book covers both the semantics of objects and their typing rules, and explains a range of object-oriented concepts, such as self, dynamic dispatch, classes, inheritance, prototyping, subtyping, covariance and contravariance, and method specialization. (From back-cover copy)