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Lookup NU author(s): Dr James Armstrong
There is an ongoing controversy in the object-oriented community over whether inheritance should be used to build class hierarchies that reflect conceptual models of a problem domain, or used simply to maximize the amount of code reuse in a system. This paper argues, by means of formal models, that although modelling integrity is certainly desirable, inheritance mechanisms at the moment do not provide proper support for it. On the contrary, even those with type compatibility rules actually provide support for code reuse, rather than for conceptual modelling. In fact, inheritance mechanisms, viewed from an architectural level of abstraction, behave in a way which can be compared to the import/export reuse mechanisms found in object-based languages such as Ada. The paper demonstrates this by presenting models of inheritance hierarchies, and of module hierarchies with imports and exports (but without inheritance), and defining a translation function from the former to the latter.
Author(s): Armstrong JM, Howse JR, Mitchell RJ, Maung I
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1993
Pages: 20
Print publication date: 01/07/1993
Source Publication Date: July 1993
Report Number: 434
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/434.pdf
