"Program Fragments, Linking, and Modularization"
Luca Cardelli
Report #144, February 15, 1997. 25 pages. 

Module mechanisms have received considerable theoretical attention, but 
the associated concepts of separate compilation and linking have not 
been emphasized. Anomalous module systems have emerged in functional 
and object-oriented programming where software components are not separately 
typecheckable and compilable. In this paper we provide a context where 
linking can be studied, and separate compilability can be formally stated 
and checked. We propose a framework where each module is separately compiled 
to a self-contained entity called a linkset; we show that separately compiled, 
compatible modules can be safely linked together.