Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

use Perl

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Composition is More Important Than Inheritance More | Login | Reply

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

Disentangle Polymorphism and Inheritance! (Score:1)

by chromatic (983)

If inheritance was as important in design as generally seems to be believed, then CPAN would consist mostly of derived classes, with only a relatively small number of base classes.

Perhaps you would, if CPAN modules generally had good design (I'm not willing to make that assumption in general) or if module authors were truly egoless programmers (I point you to templating systems, argument processing modules, web frameworks, class creation modules...).
Polymorphism is useful only when you have a subclass
- Re: (Score:2)
  
  by malte (1708)
  
  Very True. JavaScript and other prototype-based languages are good examples of languages that implement a very extreme form of polymorphism without even supporting language-level inheritance.
Where inheritance is useful (Score:1)

by Alias (5735)

In the few large systems I've implemented, the most obvious use for me of large-scale inheritance was a widget system. 90 classes, 30-50k LOC, and large scale inheritance.

But beyond that, I think inheritance is just another implementation method.

Pick the best one for the job.

Get More Comments

Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.