Integrating OOP and tasking

Abstract

Ada 2005 has provided limited integration between its object-oriented programming and tasking facilities. The compromise has been to allow tasks and protected types to support interfaces but not inheritance. Whilst the language supports timed/conditional entry calls and the select-thenabort statement using interfaces, it does not allow the target of a requeue statement to be determined via an interface. This paper argues that this design decision needlessly limits the expressive power of the language. A motivating example is used to illustrate the case, and the semantics of the proposed language extension are discussed.