In Informal Introduction into the Concept-Oriented Programming, Alexandr Savinov describes a new approach to programming based on using concepts instead of conventional classes and inclusion relation instead of inheritance. It generalizes OOP and allows the programmer to modularize cross-cutting concerns. In CoP, a great deal of functions is executed implicitly during object access via custom references with custom behaviour. There are several important points about this new approach briefly outlined below.
Concepts instead of classesUse concepts instead of classes in OOP where a concept is defined as a pair of two classes: one reference class and one object class. If a concept does not define its reference class then it is equivalent to a conventional class. Both objects and references possess some structure and behavioral methods. One simple consequence of having concepts is that objects are represented and accessed indirectly using custom references with arbitrary domain-specific structure and functions.
Inclusion instead of inheritanceInclusion relation is used in CoP where inheritance is used in OOP. Inclusion generalizes inheritance and, if a concept does not define its reference class (and hence is equivalent to a class), then inclusion is equivalent to inheritance. In the general case inclusion relation is interpreted as IS-IN relation while inheritance is interpreted as IS-A. As a consequence, a parent object may have many children. Another consequence is that object references have a hierarchical structure, i.e., they consist of several segments similar to postal addresses. Thus objects exist in a hierarchical address space which is modeled by the programmer.
Dual methodsEach concept has two definitions for each method provided in its reference class and object class. However, when methods are used they are applied to variables without any indication what definition to call, i.e., methods are used precisely as it is done in OOP. In order to resolve this ambiguity CoP introduces the mechanism of dual methods which specifies the necessary sequence of access. One property of this mechanism is that it is still possible to override parent methods by children but in addition it is also possible to override child methods from the existing parent. In the latter case the parent object will be able to actively intervene into the sequence of access by intercepting incoming method calls.
Cross-cutting concerns<The ability of parents to intercept all access requests independent of the type of the target child object makes it possible to modularize cross-cutting concerns existing in the program. This means that parent concepts play a role of aspects in AOP but do it completely differently. They are able to transparently inject the necessary intermediate functions when target object are about to be accessed. In this sense CoP can be viewed as an alternative to AOP.
Data modellingCoP is part of a new approach to data modelling, which is called concept-oriented data model (CoM). This data model consists of two parts: identity modeling and entity modeling (just because concept is defined as consisting of two parts). CoP is deals with identity modeling (while entity modeling is based on other principles). Therefore it looks quite promising from the point of view of integrating programming and data modeling (so called impedance mismatch in its different forms).
Oh, the Things I Know 