Doing it better 1999-05-29
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From Reuben.

> First, inheritance is not an easy concept unless you are familiar with it,
> just like sets, and I don't think that can be used in its favour.

The point is not that it's easier or harder (probably about the same) but
that it's more appropriate. But I'm not proposing inheritance anyway. At
least, not class-based.

> Second, multiple inheritance has a lot of semantic subtleties which
> rarely crop up. However, when they do they have to be resolved in a
> well-defined way, and I think the set representation is as
> well-defined as I'm going to get.

I think multiple inheritance is the main reason to avoid inheritance: it's
jolly useful, but gets sticky; unfortunately I've not yet seen a good way
of keeping MI without getting into problems of some sort. No wonder Java
dumped it.

The nice thing about context is that it's explicitly just an extension of
scoping, which is all OOP is in the first place (from a linguistic point
of view).

--
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rrt1001/ | certain, a.  insufficiently analysed