Some alternatives to inheritance

Aman Singhal

14y2.4kJava

Hi Friends What are some alternatives to inheritance?

2 Replies

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Vulpes14y ago
Another alternative to inheritance is to simply copy and paste the members of the 'parent' class into the 'child' class. You can then, if necessary, redefine some of the members to do what you want in relation to the child class.

However, this is a crude approach which duplicates code and explains why inheritance and virtual members were introduced into object oriented languages in the first place!
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Satyapriya Nayak14y ago
Delegation is an alternative to inheritance. Delegation means that you include an instance of another class as an instance variable, and forward messages to the instance. It is often safer than inheritance because it forces you to think about each message you forward, because the instance is of a known class, rather than a new class, and because it doesn't force you to accept all the methods of the super class: you can provide only the methods that really make sense. On the other hand, it makes you write more code, and it is harder to re-use (because it is not a subclass).
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