PENNY--a programming language and compiler for the context interchange project

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).by Fortunato Pena.M.Eng

Resolving Ambiguities Caused by Multiple Inheritance

. In object-oriented languages, multiple inheritance can cause ambiguities when methods of the same name are inherited from more than one superclass of a given class. In C++, qualifiers can be used to explicitly state which method should be inherited. We describe a mathematical foundation for an object-oriented language that uses qualifiers or roles to resolve such ambiguity. Our theory also allows us to model the role "super". For languages with dynamic overriding [1], it further allows us to model monotonic inheritance of multi-valued methods. Finally, we describe a possible implementation of query evaluation in our language. This work extends that presented in [5]. 1 Introduction In object-oriented languages with multiple inheritance, a class may inherit methods from more than one superclass. For example, class teaching assistant might inherit methods directly from classes student and employee. One of the problems with multiple inheritance is that an ambiguity arises when a method..