Multiple Inheritance

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We cover inheritance in much more detail in Chapter 7, "Mastering Inheritance and Composition." However, this is a good place to begin discussing multiple inheritance, which is one of the more powerful and challenging aspects of class design.

As the name implies, multiple inheritance allows a class to inherit from more than one class. In practice, this seems like a great idea. Objects are supposed to model the real world, are they not? And there are many real-world examples of multiple inheritance. Parents are a good example of multiple inheritance. Each child has two parents ”that's just the way it is. So it makes sense that you can design classes by using multiple inheritance. In some OO languages, such as C++, you can.

However, this situation falls into a category similar to operator overloading. Multiple inheritance is a very powerful technique, and in fact, some problems are quite difficult to solve without it. Multiple inheritance can even solve some problems quite elegantly. However, multiple inheritance can significantly increase the complexity of a system, both for the programmer and the compiler writers.

As with operator overloading, the designers of Java and C# decided that the increased complexity of allowing multiple inheritance far outweighed its advantages, so they eliminated it from the language. In some ways, the Java and C# language construct of interfaces compensates for this; however, the bottom line is that Java and C# do not allow conventional multiple inheritance.

Behavioral and Implementation Inheritance

Java and C# interfaces are a mechanism for behavioral inheritance, whereas abstract classes are used for implementation inheritance. The bottom line is that Java and C# interfaces provide interfaces, but no implementation, whereas abstract classes may provide both interfaces and implementation. This topic is covered in great detail in Chapter 8, "Frameworks and Reuse: Designing with Interfaces and Abstract Classes."


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Object-Oriented Thought Process
Object-Oriented Thought Process, The (3rd Edition)
ISBN: 0672330164
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 164
Authors: Matt Weisfeld

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