Mixin-based inheritance
OOPSLA/ECOOP '90: Proceedings of the European conference on object-oriented programming on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, page 303--311. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (1990)DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/97945.97982
Abstract
The diverse inheritance mechanisms provided by Smalltalk, Beta, and CLOS are interpreted as different uses of a single underlying construct. Smalltalk and Beta differ primarily in the direction of class hierarchy growth. These inheritance mechanisms are subsumed in a new inheritance model based on composition of mixins, or abstract subclasses. This form of inheritance can also encode a CLOS multiple-inheritance hierarchy, although changes to the encoded hierarchy that would violate encapsulation are difficult. Practical application of mixin-based inheritance is illustrated in a sketch of an extension to Modula-3.
