Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on MechAnisms for SPEcialization, Generalization and inHerItance

Inheritance and allied mechanisms are probably the single most perspicuous facet of object-orientation, even though there are object-oriented languages without (true) inheritance. The history of inheritance in programming languages dates back to Simula-67, where it was called prefixing. Nevertheless, after 46 years inheritance is not a closed book: there are still open questions and controversies about inheritance. This workshop will bring together researchers who are working on these open questions and controversies and suggesting new approaches and solutions. These topics have been mostly discussed in the programming language community, but views and insights from other communities, such as object-oriented modelling and object databases, were very welcome. In fact, it was decided to combine MASPEGHI with the COOMPL (Combined Object-Oriented Modeling and Programming Languages) workshop, expecting synergy and cross-fertilisation.