Mosaic objects and method for optimizing object representation performance in an object-oriented representation system

#A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.

#This invention relates to the field generally known as artificial intelligence and more particularly to programming in frame-based systems or more generally to object-oriented systems. Specifically, this invention relates to techniques for software development of an object-oriented system.

#In the past, optimization of software-based systems and specifically of object-oriented systems has been dependent on the developer. While no solution for general software-based systems is known, characteristics of object-oriented systems have features which, according to the invention disclosed hereinafter, permit developer-independent optimization.

#FIG. 1 is a graphical representation of an object-oriented system illustrating a single object according to the invention.

#FIG. 2 is a graphical representation of an attribute access descriptor in a portion of computer memory according to the invention.

#FIG. 3 is a graphical r presentation of an attribute value array in a further portion of computer memory according to the invention.

#In order to understand the invention, it is helpful to first outline the structure of objects and then show how to access the attributes in a fully dynamic mode. Thereafter, it is helpful to show how to access the attributes in a progressively more efficient and more static mode. With that one can appreciate the corresponding significant performance enhancement of the invention, which herein is referred to as a "mosaic object"-based system. It will be seen that a mosaic object is implemented as a pointer to a memory location in a software system on a computer.

#It is useful to separate the way in which attribute values are accessed from the values themselves. Referring to FIG. 1, there is shown a graphical representation of a portion of memory 10 in an object-oriented system according to the invention. An object is represented in related storage locations of a memory 10 by an attribute access table 12 and an attribute value array 14. The attribute access table 12 need not be a sequential order of memory locations. The attribute value array 14 is as a rule unique to the object and as a consequence an attribute value array 14 is a set of sequential storage locations containing structure provided for each object as represented by the elements 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46.

#The attribute access table 12 is a hash table which contains structure or attribute access descriptors 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45 which are pointers to locations of the elements 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46 in order to interpret the attribute value array 14. Referring to FIG. 2, there is shown a table representing the attribute access descriptors structure 31 of one element 16 of an attribute access table 12. The first word or field in the structure 31 is the attribute selector (AS) 48. Another significant field is the attribute offset (AO) 50. Other fields are Inheritance Information (IO) 52, Attribute Type (AT) 54, and flags (F1) 56, (F2) 58, (F3) 60. The attribute offset 50, for example, is a value indicating an offset from a base address in an attribute value array 14 where the desired value is to be found.