Concept-Oriented Programming

TL;DR

Concept-Oriented Programming (COP) is a novel paradigm that treats references as first-class citizens with their own structure and behavior, enabling more explicit modeling of program complexity beyond traditional object-oriented approaches.

Contribution

The paper introduces the concept construct and a new inclusion relation, generalizing classes and inheritance, to explicitly model references and their behaviors in programming.

Findings

References in COP have application-specific structure and behavior.

COP allows explicit modeling of both object functions and reference functionalities.

References and objects are treated equally as first-class citizens.

Abstract

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is aimed at describing the structure and behaviour of objects by hiding the mechanism of their representation and access in primitive references. In this article we describe an approach, called concept-oriented programming (COP), which focuses on modelling references assuming that they also possess application-specific structure and behaviour accounting for a great deal or even most of the overall program complexity. References in COP are completely legalized and get the same status as objects while the functions are distributed among both objects and references. In order to support this design we introduce a new programming construct, called concept, which generalizes conventional classes and concept inclusion relation generalizing class inheritance. The main advantage of COP is that it allows programmers to describe two sides of any program: explicitly used functions of objects and intermediate functionality of references having cross-cutting nature and executed implicitly behind the scenes during object access.