"Inheritance considered harmful"

[Steven R. Newcomb]

[Paul Prescod <papresco at technologist.com>:]

> That's right. That's why people get so confused about them. The word
> inheritance is inherently misleading when applied to architectural
> forms.

Paul is absolutely right, but I'm still not going to take his advice.

For several months last year, I deliberately stopped using the
word "inherit", as in "inheriting architecture", "inherited-from
architecture", etc.  Instead, I very carefully used the words
"derived" for the inheriting architecture and "enabling" for the
inherited architecture.  This is the vocabulary used in the standard.

Ultimately, however, I reluctantly gave up on precision vocabulary
because nobody understood what I was talking about, except for people
whom I had no need to reach because they already understood the
concepts.  In almost all rhetorical situations, I have to use
vocabulary that may be, strictly speaking, misleading, and yet
provides some glimmer of understanding to the HyTime-inexperienced.
I'm back to "inherited" and "inheriting", and I never even try to use
"enabling" and "derived" any more.  I'm open to other suggestions,
though.  Got any?


-Steve

--
Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc.
srn at techno.com  http://www.techno.com  ftp.techno.com

voice: +1 972 231 4098 (at ISOGEN: +1 214 953 0004 x137)
fax    +1 972 994 0087 (at ISOGEN: +1 214 953 3152)

3615 Tanner Lane
Richardson, Texas 75082-2618 USA

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)