in reply to I don't think inheritance is essential
in thread Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd edition

IMO your point number two is pretty fundamental to object orientation and is a very good one-line synopsis, you take a class and extend it by adding functionality, but keeping all the stuff you don't want to re-invent. And it gives you a nice tree to draw when you are designing your system.

Personally, I can't think of a good reason not to use inheritance.

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Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

  • Comment on Re: I don't think inheritance is essential

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Re^2: I don't think inheritance is essential
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 01, 2005 at 17:18 UTC
    Personally, I can't think of a good reason not to use inheritance.

    I can. It encourages code reuse along the wrong lines, caring more about position in an arbitrary (and quite possibly wrong hierarchy) than about the capabilities of the class.

    That's why Perl 6 encourages the use of roles.

[reply]
      Yes, multiple inheritance is quite lame for mixin style programming, but try to think a bit more abstract.
      The important part is that we use it in combination with NEXT for AOP like programming, think AspectJ without static trigger points!
      package Foo;

use base qw/Bar::Unicode Bar/;

__PACKAGE__->prepare_parameters;


package Bar;

sub prepare_parameters {
    my $class = shift;

    # initialize parameters...
}


package Bar::Unicode;

use NEXT;

sub prepare_parameters {
    my $class = shift;

    # let parent initialize parameters
    $class->NEXT::prepare_parameters;

    # utf8 encode parameters...
}

      [download]
      Hope this makes it a bit clearer.
[reply]
[d/l]

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