What's wrong with inheritance?

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

On Sun, Sep 27, 1998 at 04:33:05AM -0400, dufrp@oricom.ca wrote:
> Here and there I see comments from Fare about the fact that
> inheritance being such a lame thing, but no clear explanation of why?
Hum. Does this mean that my Glossary article is not clear enough?
I guess so.

> Did saw a comment in glossary saying that inheritance can be
> replaced by higher-order functions, but it is not clear in my mind how.
Inheritance is just defining a mixin and using it at once.

> Maybe a small example could help me understand.
Maybe the classical books/articles by Abadi and Cardelli may help.
Also Kris De Volder's thesis.
There are *many* articles about giving a formal semantics to objects,
lost of them available on the net.
Ask bibliographical databases, AltaVista and/or FermiVista.
Read some of them. You might be enlightened.
And of course, contribute your findings to the Review subproject,
by sending URLs/BibTeX entries for the best/worst articles...

> Inheritance still seem  to me as a good way to achieve polymorphism.
If you're using a dynamically typed language, it may be.

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