Abstract not found

Development of reusable software is an important software-engineering problem. Researchers address this problem by designing programming languages with features to support the development of modular software. Object-oriented languages support modularity by providing abstractions, such as Modula-3's abstract data types, that separate a software component's interface from its implementation. Some object-oriented features, however, incur runtime costs, because they shift binding time, which is the time when the complete representations of types and variables are known, from compile time to run time. Late binding makes it difficult for a compiler to implement these features efficiently. This thesis describes a software approach to the problem of implementing high-level programming languages with late binding. We show how Modula-3's and C++'s features that require late binding can be implemented more efficiently with an optimizing linker. We describe the design and implementation of m...