Why the static class cannot be inherited?

Question

Hi Everyone, Why can't we make inherit the static classes? Thanks, maheswar

Vulpes · Answer

Static classes are set up in such a way that inheritance would not make sense and so are implicitly sealed. To prevent any instances being created, they have no instance constructor (not even a private one) and so can only have static members. If it were possible to inherit from a static class, then the first thing a derived class's constructor would need to do would be to call its base class constructor. As it doesn't have one, that would be impossible and so inheritance is prohibited.

Pravin More · Answer

Hi maheswar, because there is no need to inherit static class if you can access all its static members by class name itself.They are sealed classes n you cant inherit it. Thanx, Pravin.

Hemant Kumar · Answer

Citation from here : This is actually by design. There seems to be no good reason to inherit a static class. It has public static members that you can always access via the class name itself. The only reasons I have seen for inheriting static stuff have been bad ones, such as saving a couple of characters of typing. There may be reason to consider mechanisms to bring static members directly into scope (and we will in fact consider this after the Orcas product cycle), but static class inheritance is not the way to go: It is the wrong mechanism to use, and works only for static members that happen to reside in a static class.

Why the static class cannot be inherited?

Answers (3)