A Strategy for Compiling Classes, Inheritance, and Dynamic Binding

This paper presents a refinement strategy for the compilation of a subset of Java that includes classes, inheritance, dynamic binding, visibility control, and recursion. We tackle the problem of compiler correctness by reducing the task of compilation to that of program refinement. More specifically, refinement laws are used as compilation rules to reduce the source program to a normal form that models an interpreter running the target code. The compilation process is formalized within a single and uniform semantic framework, where translations or comparisons between semantics are avoided. Each compilation rule can be proved correct with respect to the algebraic laws of the language.