Flexible Alias Protection

Aliasing is endemic in object oriented programming. Because an object can be modified via any alias, object oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyse. Flexible alias protection is a conceptual model of inter-object relationships which limits the visibility of changes via aliases, allowing objects to be aliased but mitigating the undesirable effects of aliasing. Flexible alias protection can be checked statically using programmer supplied aliasing modes and imposes no run-time overhead. Using flexible alias protection, programs can incorporate mutable objects, immutable values, and updatable collections of shared objects, in a natural object oriented programming style, while avoiding the problems caused by aliasing