RE: Inheritance/defaulting of attributes

Andrew Layman (andrewl@microsoft.com)
Tue, 7 Oct 1997 17:25:57 -0700

I decided to learn about inheritance by talking to people in a number of
different groups at Microsoft, ranging from products to research, from
programming languages to databases to knowledge representation.

I wish I had a good answer for you. I don't.

Instead, I found that for every single behavior of inheritance (a) some
people can give a very reasonable justification for it and (b) other
people can give an equally reasonable justification for why a different
behavior is needed.

We are seeing that on this list also. Clearly inheritance is going to
be difficult to work out.

--Andrew Layman
AndrewL@microsoft.com