I am using object-oriented programming (OOP) and like it! I'm using OOP via Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. For inhe

I am using object-oriented programming (OOP) and like it! I'm using OOP via Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. For inheritance, I've never tried to understand it or use it. Yes, the .NET Framework apparently uses inheritance, but there as far as I can see mostly the inheritance is mostly just imaginary, mostly just a means of documentation. E.g., I can have a variable X of type byte, integer, float, GUID, etc. and write X.ToString, that is, pass (it really is essentially call-return semantics) the method ToString inherited from somewhere, some abstract class or some such, but I don't believe that there is actually any real inheriting going on. Maybe there is some overloading, but then the spelling 'ToString' is just a convenience for documentation and usage. Or, just as easily it could be that in case the type of X was integer, then I could write X.ToStringInt where the method ToStringInt was for converting integers to strings. Fine with me. I know; I know: If I can write X.ToString when the type of X is an integer, then where X is declared I can change its type to, say, GUID and keep the code X.ToString and, thus, get code rewuse, but I'd nearly never do that! Instead I'd want to check over my code to be sure the code still did what I wanted it to do. Mostly I look at instances of classes much like in PL/I where there were data structures like Declare n_points Integer, 1 A Based, 2 Coordinates( n_points ), 2 X Float, 2 Y Float, 2 Lengths (n_points) Float; So, in Visual Basic .NET could write