contravariance

English

Etymology

contra- +‎ variance

Noun

contravariance (countable and uncountable, plural contravariances)

1. (object-oriented programming) The reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator.

   Coordinate term: covariance

   • 2005, Jesse Liberty, Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook, "O'Reilly Media, Inc." (→ISBN), page 47:

     I get why with covariance I can return a Dog (a Dog is a Mammal), but why does contravariance work the other way? Shouldn't it accept a derived type when it expects a base type? Contravariance is consistent with Postel's Law: […]

2. (category theory) A functor which reverses composition.

Related terms

• contravariant

Translations

reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator

• Finnish: kontravarianssi, kontravarianssi
• French: contravariance (fr) f
• Portuguese: contravariância f
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Romanian: contravarianță f
• Russian: контрвариация f (kontrvariacija)

functor which reverses composition

• Finnish: kontravarianssi
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}

Further reading

• covariance and contravariance (computer science) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

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French

Noun

contravariance f (plural contravariances)

1. (object-oriented programming) contravariance

Further reading

• “contravariance”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.