UMLR — About prescribed port implementation

Description:

The prescription made in the §11.3.3 about the implementation of Port seems to be overly restrictive:

“When an instance of an EncapsulatedClassifier is created, instances corresponding to each of its Ports are created and held in the slots specified by each Port, in accordance with its type and multiplicity. These instances are referred to as “interaction points” and provide unique references.”

As long as port is defined as “a distinct interaction point”, of which the primary purpose is: “enabling different communications to be distinguished based on the Port through which they occur”, the implementation described by the text quoted above, and which based on the instantiation of a separate object, is actually a possible implementation but it is not the only one.

An alternative valuable implementation is to make them pure routing information that does not required any structural part instance (cf. SDL port semantics). UML should not prevent implementations of that kind.