Immutability specification and its applications
Igor Pechtchanski, Vivek Sarkar · 2002
A location is said to be immutable if its value and the values of selected locations reachable from it are guaranteed to remain unchanged during a specified time interval. We introduce a framework for immutability specification, and discuss its application to code optimization. Compared to a final declaration, an immutability assertion in our framework can express a richer set of immutability properties along three dimensions --- lifetime, reachability and context.