Proposal and Evaluation of Dynamic Object‐Oriented Programming

We have been studying the parallel coordinated computing system composed of several AI workstations ELIS, as well as the knowledge processing on that system. From the viewpoint of the modularity and the hierarchy, an object‐oriented approach is adopted as the fundamental paradigm. In the knowledge representation on such a system, the object for representing the knowledge must be modified in a dynamical way since the knowledge always changes by itself. In this paper, such a modifiable object is called a dynamic object. In the traditional system, however, the object has been considered as static, and instance variables, for example, cannot be added or deleted dynamically during execution. The dynamic object is realized by modifying the object mechanism of TAO, which is the kernel language of ELIS. This paper proposes a dynamic object‐oriented programming based on this dynamic object, which is suited to the representation of the changing knowledge. It is indicated that from the standpoint of the dynamic knowledge representation, the dynamic object‐oriented programming is more natural and more efficient than the traditional object‐oriented programming.