What Is Multiple Inheritance?
Multiple Inheritance occurs when a class inherits from more than one parent. For example, a person is a mammal and an intellectual_entity, and a document may be an editable_item and a kind of literature. Mixin’s is a style of MI (from flavors) where a class is created to provide additional attributes or properties to other classes. They are intended to be inherited by any class requiring them. Method combination, or calling sequences of before, after, and around methods or even several primary methods [Kim 89, ch 4], make good use of mixins by invoking their methods without explicitly calling them, allowing client class code to remain unchanged [Booch 91, p 113].
Yes, it does. Any name can be simply resolved to a class member with single inheritance by simply accessing the first name encountered for data members and by accessing the first signature match (or ambiguity) encountered for methods (at least one way, C++ hides some member functions). Since several distinct parents can declare a member within a multiple inheritance hierarchy, which to choose becomes an issue. Eiffel forces derived classes to rename parent members that conflict. Self prioritizes parents. CLOS merges member “slots” (instance variables) with the same name into a single slot, as did the earlier flavors. C++ declares an error iff a conflict arises, but a class qualifier can be used to explicitly disambiguate. Smalltalk renders same names for instance variables of subclasses illegal. On the other hand, multiple-inheritance can be seen as required for basic object-oriented programming, because many objects in the real world belong to several classes.
Roughly speaking, multiple inheritance (a staple of object-oriented programming) refers to a programming language’s ability to create objects that can be treated differently, depending on how a construct wants to treat it. The primary mechanism by which most modern OOP languages (such as Java and C#) implement this is through the use of interfaces. An interface is an abstract, incomplete object definition. Essentially it’s like a class, but does not contain any executable code—its up to the class that implements the interface to do that. In a traditional OOP language, you can only inherit from one class, but you can implement many interfaces. In this way you could have an object that has many different facets, so that other methods expecting a specific interface can expect it to have the necessary field for proper execution. Of course, ECMAScript does not support the interface concept. (Well, not the JavaScript 1.x branch.) But by clever usage of the function.call method, we can create
