In computer programming, a trait is a concept used in programming languages which represents a set of methods that can be used to extend the functionality of a class.
In object-oriented programming, behavior is sometimes shared between classes which are not related to each other. For example, many unrelated classes may have methods to serialize objects to JSON. Historically, there have been several approaches to solve this without duplicating the code in every class needing the behavior. Other approaches include multiple inheritance and mixins, but these have drawbacks: the behavior of the code may unexpectedly change if the order in which the mixins are applied is altered, or if new methods are added to the parent classes or mixins.
Traits solve these problems by allowing classes to use the trait and get the desired behavior. If a class uses more than one trait, the order in which the traits are used does not matter. The methods provided by the traits have direct access to the data of the class.
Traits combine aspects of protocols (interfaces) and mixins. Like an interface, a trait defines one or more method signatures, of which implementing classes must provide implementations. Like a mixin, a trait provides additional behavior for the implementing class.
In case of a naming collision between methods provided by different traits, the programmer must explicitly disambiguate which one of those methods will be used in the class; thus manually solving the diamond problem of multiple inheritance. This is different from other composition methods in object-oriented programming, where conflicting names are automatically resolved by scoping rules.
Operations which can be performed with traits include:
symmetric sum: an operation that merges two disjoint traits to create a new trait
override (or asymmetric sum): an operation that forms a new trait by adding methods to an existing trait, possibly overriding some of its methods
alias: an operation that creates a new trait by adding a new name for an existing method
exclusion: an operation that forms a new trait by removing a method from an existing trait.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
This is a practice-based course, where students program algorithms in machine learning and evaluate the performance of the algorithm thoroughly using real-world dataset.
This seminar teaches the participants to use advanced Python concepts for writing easier to read, more flexible and faster code.
It teaches concepts in a hands-on and tangible fashion, providing examp
An intensive, hands-on, pragmatic introduction to computer programming. Students learn basic concepts like data types, control structures, string processing, functions, input/output. They perform simu
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and the code is in the form of procedures (often known as methods). A common feature of objects is that procedures (or methods) are attached to them and can access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually a special name such as or used to refer to the current object.
Kotlin (ˈkɒtlɪn) is a cross-platform, statically typed, general-purpose high-level programming language with type inference. Kotlin is designed to interoperate fully with Java, and the JVM version of Kotlin's standard library depends on the Java Class Library, but type inference allows its syntax to be more concise. Kotlin mainly targets the JVM, but also compiles to JavaScript (e.g., for frontend web applications using React) or native code via LLVM (e.g., for native iOS apps sharing business logic with Android apps).
In object-oriented programming languages, a mixin (or mix-in) is a class that contains methods for use by other classes without having to be the parent class of those other classes. How those other classes gain access to the mixin's methods depends on the language. Mixins are sometimes described as being "included" rather than "inherited". Mixins encourage code reuse and can be used to avoid the inheritance ambiguity that multiple inheritance can cause (the "diamond problem"), or to work around lack of support for multiple inheritance in a language.
The Dependent Object Type (DOT) calculus was designed to put Scala on a sound basis, but while DOT relies on structural subtyping, Scala is a fundamentally class-based language. This impedance mismatch means that a proof of DOT soundness by itself is not e ...
2022
Covers Scala parallel collections, writing parallelism-agnostic code, converting collections, set intersection, side-effect operations, and concurrent modifications.
Covers the concepts of Comparable and Comparator interfaces in Java, explaining how classes implement these interfaces to enable object comparison.
Covers inheritance, polymorphism, and casting in object-oriented programming, emphasizing code factorization and generic object manipulation.
Analyzing the security of closed source binaries is currently impractical for end-users, or even developers who rely on third-party libraries. Such analysis relies on automatic vulnerability discovery techniques, most notably fuzzing with sanitizers enable ...
Taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversities can respond differently to biotic and abiotic filters. However, biodiversity management tends to focus on a single index, generally taxonomic diversity, assuming a strong positive correlation among biodive ...