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When inheritance was used as a primary approach to structure programs in the late 1990s, developers tended to break code into more layers of inheritance as the system functionality grew. If a development team combined multiple layers of inheritance with the single responsibility principle, this resulted in many very thin layers of code, with ...
Other approaches include multiple inheritance and mixins, but these have drawbacks: the behavior of the code may unexpectedly change if the order in which the mixins are applied is altered, or if new methods are added to the parent classes or mixins. Traits solve these problems by allowing classes to use the trait and get the desired behavior.
For example, a simple linearized object would consist of a length field, a code point identifying the class, and a data value. A more complex example would be a command consisting of the length and code point of the command and values consisting of linearized objects representing the command's parameters.
In comparison, a "class" is an abstract thing, in which objects can belong. For example, all kilogram-objects are in the class of KilogramObject, which might be a subclass of MetricObject, and so on. Prototypal inheritance in JavaScript is described by Douglas Crockford as You make prototype objects, and then … make new instances.
Not all languages support multiple inheritance. For example, Java allows a class to implement multiple interfaces, but only inherit from one class. [22] If multiple inheritance is allowed, the hierarchy is a directed acyclic graph (or DAG for short), otherwise it is a tree. The hierarchy has classes as nodes and inheritance relationships as links.
In object-oriented programming, the open–closed principle (OCP) states "software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification"; [1] that is, such an entity can allow its behaviour to be extended without modifying its source code. The name open–closed principle has
On the other hand, inheritance can be statically type-checked, while delegation generally cannot without generics (although a restricted version of delegation can be statically typesafe [7]). Delegation can be termed "run-time inheritance for specific objects." Here is a pseudocode example in a C#/Java like language:
Composition over inheritance (or composite reuse principle) in object-oriented programming (OOP) is the principle that classes should favor polymorphic behavior and code reuse by their composition (by containing instances of other classes that implement the desired functionality) over inheritance from a base or parent class. [2]