This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Multiple Inheritance
We cover inheritance in much more detail in Chapter 7, “Mastering Inheritance and Composition.” However, this is a good place to begin discussing multiple inheritance, which is one of the more powerful and challenging aspects of class design.
As the name implies, multiple inheritance allows a class to inherit from more than one class. In practice, this seems like a great idea. Objects are supposed to model the real world, are they not? And many real-world examples of multiple inheritance exist. Parents are a good example of multiple inheritance. Each child has two parents—that’s just the way it is. So it makes sense that you can design classes by using multiple inheritance. In some OO languages, such as C++, you can.
However, this situation falls into a category similar to operator overloading. Multiple inheritance is a very powerful technique, and in fact, some problems are quite difficult to solve without it. Multiple inheritance can even solve some problems quite elegantly. However, multiple inheritance can significantly increase the complexity of a system, both for the programmer and the compiler writers.
As with operator overloading, the designers of Java, .NET, and Objective-C decided that the increased complexity of allowing multiple inheritance far outweighed its advantages, so they eliminated it from the language. In some ways, the Java, .NET, and Objective-C language construct of interfaces compensates for this; however, the bottom line is that Java, .NET, and Objective-C do not allow conventional multiple inheritance.