Multiple Inheritance

Multiple inheritance means that a class can have multiple superclasses and inherit from them.

Multiple inheritance can cause several problems:

• Name conflicts of instance variables.
• Methods with the same name from multiple parents.
• Instance variables no longer have simple constant offsets.

Variations of inheritance include:

• Using types of all arguments (not just the first) to determine the method (CLOS)
• Method Combination (Flavors): the methods of multiple parents can be combined, e.g. a window with border and title.
• SendSuper (Loops): a more specialized subclass method can call the parent method. Useful e.g. to assign serial numbers to manufactured objects.