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It's interesting to think about what multiple dispatch abuse would be. As far as I know, implementation inheritance can be misapplied when you try too hard to
by gugagore 7y ago
It's interesting to think about what multiple dispatch abuse would be.
As far as I know, implementation inheritance can be misapplied when you try too hard to use the language's type system to capture some domain-specific model. e.g. you're dealing with multiple kinds of entities, and they all have a `name`, so you decide that all of the classes should inherit from `class Named`, because they have that in common with each other.
Well, there's lots of different taxonomies possible for your entities, probably. And single implementation inheritance lets you express just one taxonomy. Interfaces and multiple inheritance aim to allow multiple co-existing taxonomies, but I can't really explain the ways in which its misapplied.
I agree that there are some clear situations for implementation inheritance, so it seems like a useful pattern to be able to support. I think the discussion is whether it should be a key design principle, and built into the language design, or if the language design should be more general, so that implementation inheritance can be built on top of that.