Lazy typing

"The reflective technique of lazy typing-deferring the exact definition of object methods until the last possible moment-can help programmers more easily and consistently deal with partial or incomplete data."

"Many applications deal with data that are not easy to accommodate in conventional data models. This paper shows how the advanced features of modern programming platforms allow the transparent implementation of lazy typing capabilities than can then be easily used by programmers. As a first approximation to the problem, we show how these capabilities can be used to develop applications with fuzzy types."

The framework we present responds to programmers' needs by providing an easy-to-use transparent mechanism to deal withimprecision in the description of objects. Our framework implementation makes use of advanced features of reflection and metadata attributes in the .NET platform in order to make the implementation of fuzzy user-defined classes easier and it can be used without interfering with the usual object-oriented software development tasks.

Comparison plays a determining role in many problems related to object management. Every modern programming language provides a comparison method (e.g. the equals method in Java) that allows us to compare two objects of any user-defined class. However, if we develop classes to imprecisely represent objects described using Fuzzy Set Theory, the built-in method is no longer suitable. Fuzzy object comparison must be handled using a fuzzy equality concept. We describe how to enable modern programming platforms so that classes with imprecise attributes can be developed and fuzzy objects of these classes can easily be compared. In particular, we introduce a generic fuzzyEquals method in Java.