Associations as first-class citizens in OO languages

The other day I was wondering about why we even need things like MOF/EMF (ignoring the cross-language story). That is, why don’t modern OO languages include associations (and their containment/multiplicity constraints) as first-class concepts.

Today I browsed over to this article by Dave Thomas (of smalltalk fame), a sometime DSTC visitor, and found this sentence:

Closely related to this is the interesting work on making relationships found in ER and UML models first class types in a programming language [2].

[2] Gavin Bierman, Alisdair Wren, First-Class relationships in an object-oriented language, ECOOP 2005, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~aw345/talks/ecoop05.pdf

The link goes to the slides, and I haven’t spent time on the details, but I’m glad other people are thinking about this too.

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