Just-in-Time Inheritance: A Dynamic and Implicit Multiple Inheritance Mechanism
Multiple inheritance is often criticised for the ambiguity that arises when multiple parents want to pass on a feature with the same name to their offspring.
A survey of programming languages reveals that no programming language has an inherently implicit and dynamic approach to resolve this ambiguity.
This paper identifies just-in-time inheritance as the first implicit and dynamic inheritance mechanism. The key idea of just-in-time inheritance is that one of the parents is favoured over the others, which resolves the ambiguity, and that the favoured parent can change at runtime.
However, just-in-time inheritance is not the silver bullet to solve all ambiguity problems heir to multiple inheritance, because it is not applicable in all scenarios.
We conclude that the applicability of just-in-time inheritance is to be found in systems where multiple inheritance is used to model an “is-a OR is-a”-relation, rather than the more traditional “is-a AND is-a”-relation.
Presentation slides (DLS16-final.pdf) | 1.20MiB |
Tue 1 Nov
10:30 - 10:55 Talk | Gianluca MezzettiAarhus University, Denmark, Anders MøllerAarhus University, Denmark, Fabio StroccoAarhus University, Denmark DOI | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10:55 - 11:20 Talk | Thomas S. HeinzeAarhus University, Denmark, Anders MøllerAarhus University, Denmark, Fabio StroccoAarhus University, Denmark DOI | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11:20 - 11:45 Talk | Changhee ParkKAIST, South Korea, Hyeonseung ImKangwon National University, South Korea, Sukyoung RyuKAIST, South Korea DOI | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11:45 - 12:10 Talk | Mattias De WaelVrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, Janwillem SwalensVrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, Wolfgang De MeuterVrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium DOI Pre-print File Attached |