[TYPES] New paper on checking protected member access in the JVM

[Alessandro Coglio]

TITLE:
Checking Access to Protected Members in the Java Virtual Machine

AUTHOR:
Alessandro Coglio

ABSTRACT:
This paper studies in detail how to correctly and efficiently check 
access to protected members in the Java Virtual Machine. This aspect of 
type safety is not explained in the official specification and, to the 
author's knowledge, has been completely neglected in the research 
literature. Nonetheless, it is a subtle aspect that is not 
straightforward to implement correctly, as evidenced by the presence of 
a bug in Sun's Java 2 SDK version 1.4. This paper presents source 
programs that expose the bug, along with a conjectural explanation for 
the bug. This paper also presents some experimental measures of the 
number of checks that can be performed using various techniques.


Available at http://www.kestrel.edu/java.


Regards,

  Alessandro Coglio
  Computer Scientist @ Kestrel Institute