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From: render@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Inheritence and Delegation
Message-ID: <77500004@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 89 09:39:30 GMT
References: <125984@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Lines: 27
Nf-ID: #R:sun.Eng.Sun.COM:125984:m.cs.uiuc.edu:77500004:000:1055
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!render    Oct  8 15:19:00 1989


Written 11:26 am  Oct  7, 1989 by grover%brahmand@Sun.COM:
>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. 

I believe that you are thinking of the following article:

    "Object-Oriented Programming: Themes and Variations", by Mark Stefik and 
	Daniel G. Bobrow.  The AI Magazine, 6:4 (Winter 1986), pp 40-62.

A good general paper on OOP, with discussion of the different terms and 
techniques involved.

>Since I have been out-of-touch with OO stuff for a couple of years, can
>anyone tell me if there has been any recent work done on the semantics of
>inheritence and/or delegation? 

I'm sure there has.  I know of one paper that compares the two:

    "Delegation is Inheritance", by Lynn Andrea Stein.  Proceedings of 
	the 1987 OOPSLA Conference, pp. 138-146.

Check the Journal of OOP or later OOPSLA proceedings for more.

hal.