International Business Machines Corporation

Andrew M West

Tefcros Anthias

A system for allowing a first computer program in a first language to cooperatively process with a second object oriented computer program in another language is described. A generic send message function is interposed between the first and second computer programs to control the exchange of messages. In order to achieve this the generic send message function has access to a description of the classes in the second computer program. Having access to such a description allows the generic send message function to efficiently transfer messages between the different computer programs, and also provides the ability for the creation of new objects of classes spanning environmental boundaries. The description of the object includes data identifying the location of instance variable data for each object, a pointer to class description which includes data identifying the environment in which the class operates, a pointer to any parent class, a list of functions provided by each class, and data identifying the length of instance variable data for each object.

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Winchester, United Kingdom

Andrew M West