Prof. Dr. W. Effelsberg Fakult"at f"ur Mathematik und Informatik

iii Abstract Modern object-oriented programming languages provide Exception Handling Mechanisms (EHMs) to deal with exceptional situations during program execution. However, exception handling is still detached from the object-oriented design of a program since current EHMs cannot associate exceptions with objects. There have been attempts to associate exceptions with data structures (through data-oriented exception handling), but those solutions lack true object-oriented functionality. This thesis examines the concept of truly object-oriented Bound Exceptions. The motivation for their use is explained, as well as methods of mimicking their behaviour using conventional EHMs. Different binding strategies are presented, including Dynamic Binding, which strengthens the object-oriented design with Bound Exceptions. A Bound Exceptions design for the programming language C++ is presented and extended to support the concurrency and resumption features of _C++. Following this design, an implementation of Bound Exceptions as part of _C++'s EHM is described. v Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor at the University of Waterloo, Professor Dr. Peter Buhr, for giving me the opportunity to write this thesis. It was his guidance and support that made this work possible, and for this, I am very grateful. Furthermore, I would like to thank my supervisor at the University of Mannheim, Professor Dr. Wolfgang Effelsberg, who allowed me to come to Waterloo in the first place and whose willingness to supervise my thesis allowed me to stay here. Additional thanks go to Professor Dr. Steve MacDonald for carefully reading this work and his helpful comments