Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!brunix!sdm
From: sdm@brunix (Scott Meyers)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Inheritence and Delegation
Message-ID: <17653@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 89 00:05:31 GMT
References: <125984@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: sdm@norton.UUCP (Scott Meyers)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 14

In article <125984@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> grover%brahmand@Sun.COM (Vinod Grover) writes:
>I once read that the inheritence mechanism is a special case of a more
>general phenomena called Delegation. I cannot come up with the reference
>but unless I am mistaken I think it was an article written by Stefik and
>Bobrow in the AI Magazine a few years ago. 

Lynn Stein, a graduate student here at Brown, proved that delegation and
inheritance are equivalent.  Hence, inheritance is not a "special case" of
delegation.  For the proof, see her paper in the OOPSLA '87 Proceedings:
"Delegation Is Inheritance."

Scott Meyers
Brown University
sdm@cs.brown.edu