johnson@m.cs.uiuc.edu (12/03/90)
Inheritance means different things to different people. Tim Menzie's comments about the usefulness of inheritance is certainly not my experience, but I do not built expert systems. Most of the systems that I build are typical "systems programming", i.e. operating systems and compilers. We use inheritance to organize the programs and to make them easier to understand, not harder. Of course, our "users" are other programmers. Perhaps more importantly, we do not use inheritance ONLY for code reuse. In particular, we avoid the "flavors" style of programming, as well as multiple inheritance in general. My guess is that our different experience is caused by a different use of inheritance. Ralph Johnson - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign