Any Alternative to Inheritence?

[debasmita pattnayak]

I got this question while surfing.

The answer to this question has been given below:
Delegation is an alternative to inheritance. Delegation means that you include an instance of another class as an instance variable, and forward messages to the instance. It is often safer than inheritance because it forces you to think about each message you forward, because the instance is of a known class, rather than a new class, and because it doesn�t force you to accept all the methods of the super class: you can provide only the methods that really make sense. On the other hand, it makes you write more code, and it is harder to re-use (because it is not a subclass).

Can anyone elaborate on this a bit more?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Debasmita

[Campbell Ritchie]

That sounds like a programming maxim which reads "favour composition over inheritance."

Try googling for that and you will probably get hundreds of hits, some of them actually usful. If you Americanise the spelling of favour( ) you will get even more hints.

[edit]Spellign corrections[/edit]
[ June 05, 2008: Message edited by: Campbell Ritchie ]

[Joanne Neal]

Originally posted by Campbell Ritchie:
[edit]Spellign corrections[/edit]

[Campbell Ritchie]

Originally posted by Joanne Neal:

It was a simple mistake, but once I noticed it, I thought I would let it pass. It took people over 40 minutes to notice it.

[Joanne Neal]

Originally posted by Campbell Ritchie:
It was a simple mistake, but once I noticed it, I thought I would let it pass. It took people over 40 minutes to notice it.

Some of us have real work to do
[ June 05, 2008: Message edited by: Joanne Neal ]