Revisiting Information Hiding: Reflections on Classical and Nonclassical Modularity

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (K. Ostermann, P. Giarrusso, C. Kästner, T. Rendel)
Sat, 05 Mar 2016 18:41:39 -0500

Klaus Ostermann, Paolo G. Giarrusso, Christian Kästner, and Tillmann Rendel. Revisiting Information Hiding: Reflections on Classical and Nonclassical Modularity. In Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), volume 6813 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 155--178, Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2011.

What is modularity? Which kind of modularity should developers strive for? Despite decades of research on modularity, these basic questions have no definite answer. We submit that the common understanding of modularity, and in particular its notion of information hiding, is deeply rooted in classical logic. We analyze how classical modularity, based on classical logic, fails to address the needs of developers of large software systems, and encourage researchers to explore alternative visions of modularity, based on nonclassical logics, and henceforth called nonclassical modularity.