Handling multiple inheritance with exceptions : An alternative approach

Abstract

The design of inheritance systems that allow multiple inheritance combined with exceptions poses some difficult problems. Any good theory of inheritance should meet two, sometimes complementary, goals: it should provide answers that correspond to human intuition, and it should be backed by a simple and rational reasoning process. We propose a method for reasoning with inheritance hierarchies that focuses on differences of nodes from a common ancestor in the hierarchy to derive the set of properties inherited by a node. We show the application of the algorithm to some of the classic examples in inheritance systems, compare their results with ours, and discuss the rationale behind our approach.