A Genetic Methodology for Object Evolution

One of the major issues of object-oriented programming languages is lack of reclassification mechanisms. Reclassification allows an object to change its class at runtime. Object reclassification is desired in applications whose entities need to change dynamically at runtime. The previous approaches dealt with object reclassification in different ways. But none had approached the notion of real entities evolution, where objects can evolve while belonging to the same class. This had led to a large number of classes most of the times; making the design and the implementation of the intended system more complex. The desired evolution of objects should allow objects to evolve automatically at runtime, without changing their classes membership. In this work, we present a new approach for object evolution; inspired by some genetics concepts. Objects that belong to the same class can change their structure, functions and behaviors at run time automatically, while keeping their membership to the same class. A slight environmental influence on the proposed evolution process is introduced