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From: johnson@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: Survey: how do we really use object
Message-ID: <77500068@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 2 Dec 90 21:57:00 GMT
References: <2586@runxtsa.runx.oz.au>
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Nf-ID: #R:runxtsa.runx.oz.au:2586:m.cs.uiuc.edu:77500068:000:758
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Dec  2 15:57:00 1990


Inheritance means different things to different people.

Tim Menzie's comments about the usefulness of inheritance
is certainly not my experience, but I do not built expert
systems.  Most of the systems that I build are typical
"systems programming", i.e. operating systems and compilers.
We use inheritance to organize the programs and to make them
easier to understand, not harder.  Of course, our "users"
are other programmers.  Perhaps more importantly, we do not
use inheritance ONLY for code reuse.  In particular, we
avoid the "flavors" style of programming, as well as
multiple inheritance in general.

My guess is that our different experience is caused by a
different use of inheritance.

Ralph Johnson - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


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