The Inheritance Workshop at ECOOP 2002
June 11, 2002

This workshop is intended as a forum for designers and implementers of object-oriented languages, and for software developers with an interest in inheritance. It is hard to come up with a litmus test for object-orientedness because of the size and diversity of this field, but one of the most widely accepted ingredients would be inheritance. There has even been a backlash against inheritance, focusing on problems like fragile base classes, the so-called inheritance anomaly, encapsulation between a class and its subclasses, and more. However, we believe the abundant activity just demonstrates that inheritance is both hard to avoid, and hard to get right. The goal of this workshop is to advance the state of the art of designing inheritance mechanisms, and using inheritance judiciously. Many subtopics are relevant, including the following:

• Flaws and anomalies in the way inheritance is currently implemented or used. Examples which are hard to express.
• Inheritance mechanisms: Single, multiple, mixin based, classless, composing, first-class or second-class, aspect-oriented.
• Inheritance and parameterization, inheritance and typing, inheritance and encapsulation, inheritance and behavior.
• Inheritance and software maintenance, inheritance vs. analysis/design/implementation, inheritance vs. program understanding, refactoring, tools.
• Conceptual views upon inheritance: As a conceptual modeling tool, as a dependency management tool, as a code reuse mechanism.
• Experience on the benefits and drawbacks of inheritance in real projects.

We invite high quality position papers within the topic area. Experience papers are particularly solicited. The papers should be at most 7 pages long (shorter papers are preferred) and in PDF or Postscript format (other formats, e.g. HTML, can be accepted if necessary), and they should be submitted as e-mail attachments to the address iws2002@cs.jyu.fi Final versions of accepted position papers will be made available in the Papers section of this web-site.

The papers should be printable both on US Letter and A4 paper size, and easily readable. Therefore, the printing area should be 16 cm x 26 cm or less, including page headings and numbering. The ACM Conference style is very suitable otherwise, but a minimum font size of 10 pt with 12 pt inter-line spacing is preferred. Alternatively, the Springer LNCS style is also usable, but a larger printing area (instead of 122 mm * 193 mm) is preferred. Page numbers are also desirable.

For your convenience, we have created a small page layout adjustment file for adjustment of the printing area, and a minimal example file showing how to use it. You can then write the paper in the LNCS style as usual, with just one extra line added near the beginning, to include the layout adjustment file. A fresh copy of the LNCS class file is available, too.

The maximum number of participants will be about 30, and the maximum number of position papers to be presented will be about 12. We will accept participants in two categories:

• Constructive: those who present a position paper. Note that more papers may be accepted to the workshop proceedings than can be actually presented.
• Critical: every other participant is expected to study one or more position papers thoroughly in advance, and present concise comments at the workshop.

Every prospective participant is required to submit a position paper, and every accepted participant is urged to read all the position papers, such that the presentations, critical comments, and discussions will be based on a mutual understanding of concepts and terminology.

If there are more applicants than can be accommodated, the organizers will select the participants based on several criteria:

• the quality and relevance of each position paper
• a sufficient breadth of topics (even a good paper may get rejected, or not selected for presentation, if there are too many too closely related ones)
• the qualifications of "critical" applicants
• the number of authors of each position paper (in the worst case, only the main author will be invited)
• "first come first served", where other criteria are inconclusive