Type-safe Composition of Object Modules

                             Guruduth Banavar
                              Gary Lindstrom
                               Douglas Orr


                              UUCS-94-001


                       Department of Computer Science
                             University of Utah
                        Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA


                             January 10, 1994


                                Abstract

   We describe a facility that enables routine type-checking during
the linkage of external dec- larations and definitions of separately
compiled programs in ANSI C. The primary advantage of our server-style
type-checked linkage facility is the ability to program the co
mbination of object modules via a suite of strongly typed module
operators.  Such programmability enables one to easily incorporate
programmer-defined data format conversion stubs at link-time. In
addition, our linkage facility is able to automatically generate safe
coercion stubs for compatible encapsulated data.