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Message:
An extremist position on inheritance
Posted by Terry Braun on 21 Oct 1998, 2:10 PM
I have been thinking about this quite a bit. I would
take the requirement about "is-a" further however. If we use the example of "vehicles", "cars" and
"trucks" instead of fruit the reasoning may be
clearer. Clearly, a car is-a vehicle, as is a truck,
and therefore should use inheritance. But there are
two ways this breaks down. What exactly is a car? When you have a cargo space
is that a car? Like a van? Like a Ford Explorer?
Is a truck with a camper a truck or a car? What about
a motorcycle, an ATV, a bulldozer, and so on. You may
think this is a silly example, but I was part of a
two hour long discussion once about what a computer
"device" is. This discussion was exactly along these
line. What if you emulate the device in software,
is it a device? What if it sometimes is emulated and
sometimes is hardware assisted? I don't really know
what to call this problem. It seems to me that when
designing classes ( or the model on which to base
classes) that sometimes there is a tendency to classify
things. The second problem I have with inheritance is that
many things are better modeled and programmed as
systems with components. Over time the program that
uses car and truck classes will tend to expand to the
point that we are interested in more information about
vehicles. What type of engine does it have? Does it
have a trailer? The single object car, then breaks
down as you need to expand it into an aggregation of
components. If you use composition from the start
then the conversion to using components is easy. At one point the rather extreme saying "inheritance is
the goto of OO" popped into my mind. I don't think this
is really true, but I have been trying to think of when
it is good to use inheritance (since I disagree with the
"is-a" test). I also read the article about the java
event idiom, and that lead me to one circumstance- as
a parameterized instance of a class. As you can tell my thinking on this has a fair amount
of fog and I would appreciate seeing more discussion.
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