Bit-Level Object-Oriented Programming

Object-oriented programming languages have always distinguished between \primitives" and \user-deened" data types, and in the case of languages like C++ and Java, the prim-itives are not even treated as objects, further fragmenting the programming model. Meanwhile, hardware design languages like VHDL and Verilog provide extensive bit-level facilities but lack the abstraction capabilities of object-oriented programming because they are not straightforwardly syn-thesizable. We present Bit-Level Object-Oriented Programming (BLOOP), a language extension that allows a single object model to be used consistently from the bit level on up, combining the abstraction facilities of high-level object-oriented programming languages with the explicit control of hardware design languages. We present BLOOP as a modi-cation to the Java language, and show how it can be used to provide an executable or synthesizable speciication of operations on \primitive" data types.