Colored-Object Programming : Color Graphs, a Visual Formalism for Synthesizing the Behaviour of Objects
Abstract
This paper is about colored object programming, a refinement of object oriented programming. In this approach, the answer of an object to an external event (message or generic function call) depends not only on its class, but also on its current state. The paper presents a visual formalism (a notation, not a programming environment) for describing the whole behaviour of objects of a same class, i.e. the behaviour resulting from each behaviour increment defined in this class and in each of its superclasses. The formalism describes states and transitions between them (external events) in a N-dimensions space. It is grounded on connectedness whereas related visual formalisms are grounded on insideness (these derive from statecharts).