"Inheritance considered harmful"

[W. Eliot Kimber]

At 03:08 PM 4/2/98 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
>On Thu, 2 Apr 1998, W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
>>
>> That's probably because the architecture facility of ISO/IEC 10744 doesn't
>> *do* inheritance in the way that most people seem to expect.
>
>That's right. That's why people get so confused about them. The word 
>inheritance is inherently misleading when applied to architectural forms.
>
>Architectural forms do subtyping, not inheritance. Inheritance is about
>"getting stuff for free"  (e.g. code, declarations, fields). Subtyping is
>about *fulfilling a particular role* (perhaps through a manual
>construction of an appropriate "interface" (in this case a content
>model)). Architectural forms allow you to specify an interface that must
>be fulfilled and declare conformance to that interface. It does not allow
>you to "get code for free" (i.e. markup declarations). 

Paul has made clear what I was feebly trying to say: thanks Paul.

Cheers,

E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
Highland Consulting, a division of ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 95202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>

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