Microsoft Word OpenIssuesInOO. doc

Open Issues in Object-Oriented Programming 

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Scandinavia as a successor to Simula. Another Scandinavian project that has influenced this 

work, is  the Mjølner project [KLMM94] in which tools for supporting object-oriented soft-

ware development have been developed. 

In this paper the term object-oriented programming is used in a broad sense to cover 

what other authors designate object-oriented analysis, design, implementation, data 

modeling in databases, and distributed programming. The reason for this broad definition is 

that modeling and design have always been considered central elements in the Scandinavian 

school of object-orientation. Modeling is about creating a description of phenomena and  

concepts from a given application domain and design is about creating new phenomena 

(objects) and concepts (classes) and representing these in a program. These processes cover 

what is often called object-oriented analysis and design in popular text books [CY89, 

Boo91, RBPL91]. As mentioned later in this article, there is, however, more to analysis and 

design than creating object and class diagrams.  

Some of the issues being discussed in this paper are not considered open in the 

Scandinavian tradition, but are mentioned since they have not (yet) been adopted in general 

despite the fact that they have proven their usefulness during more than 30 years of 

experience with Simula and BETA. Other issues being discussed are considered open in 

general.  

The issues discussed in this paper are: 

•