About Inheritance

[Martin_Doering@...]

Hi!

Here is a snippet from 

Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century

                                                     John K. Ousterhout

I found it quite interesting, because a short time ago I read about 
inheritnace in the Lua papers. Maybe you are interested too.

...
Another problem with object-oriented languages is their emphasis on 
inheritance. Implementation inheritance, where one class borrows code that 
was written for another class, is a bad idea that makes software harder to 
manage and reuse. It binds the implementations of classes together so that 
neither class can be understood without the other: a subclass cannot be 
understood without knowing how the inherited methods are implemented in 
its superclass, and a superclass cannot be understood without knowing how 
its methods are inherited in subclasses. In a complex class hierarchy, no 
individual class can be understood without understanding all the other 
classes in the hierarchy. Even worse, a class cannot be separated from its 
hierarchy for reuse. Multiple inheritance makes these problems even worse. 
Implementation inheritance causes the same intertwining and brittleness 
that have been observed when goto statements are overused. As a result, object-oriented systems often 
suffer from complexity and lack of reuse. 
...

So I'm glad, that inheritance in Lua is just an option. For most scripts I 
would write I would not need this. And it would make the language itself 
more complex if totally integrated in it, like in e.g. Python. 

Martin