The point of view notion for multiple inheritance

Abstract

We examine several problems related to the preservation of the Independence Principle inheritance. This principle states that all the characteristics of independent superclasses must be inherited by subclasses, even if there are name conflicts. In this context, a conventional approach is to use explicit class selection. We show that this mechanism suffers from serious limitations, and leads to inhibition of refinement and genericity. Our experimental object-oriented language ROME introduces the “Point of View” notion (using an “as-expressions” mechanism) which solves these problems.