Mixin-based inheritance

  • Authors:
  • Gilad Bracha;William Cook

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT;Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA/ECOOP '90 Proceedings of the European conference on object-oriented programming on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

The diverse inheritance mechanisms provided by Smalltalk, Beta, and CLOS are interpreted as different uses of a single underlying construct. Smalltalk and Beta differ primarily in the direction of class hierarchy growth. These inheritance mechanisms are subsumed in a new inheritance model based on composition of mixins, or abstract subclasses. This form of inheritance can also encode a CLOS multiple-inheritance hierarchy, although changes to the encoded hierarchy that would violate encapsulation are difficult. Practical application of mixin-based inheritance is illustrated in a sketch of an extension to Modula-3.