A multiparadigmatic study of the object-oriented design patterns

Abstract. The understanding of programming paradigms has not been fully established yet, though many mainstream languages, e.g. C++, Java, ML, offer more than one paradigm. This paper addresses this un-derstanding problem through a programming experiment: considering the classic object-oriented programming (OOP) design patterns as de-scribed in the GoF book [GHJV95], we systematically look at them from the viewpoint of other paradigms, in particular the generic modular and the functional paradigms. The main results of this experiment are: (1) Many OO design pattern intents are meaningful in a more general setting than OOP, and as such they are good candidates for exploring paradigms; (2) Many OO design patterns have counterparts in generic modular pro-gramming, but with different properties, in particular with respect to dynamic/static behavior and type safety; (3) Some OOP design patterns can be implemented by using basic functional programming, justifying the idea that functional programming can also be seen as a simplified OOP having its place in a OO language; (4) Some OOP design patterns seem definitely associated with the OOP paradigm, stressing the intrinsic properties of this paradigm