A case study in the use of multiple inheritance in designing a library of reusable software components

A major feature of object-oriented programming languages (OOPLs) that promotes reuse is the ability to define new classes of components that inherit all or part of their definition from existing classes. Inheritance of features from existing classes is accomplished through three techniques: single inheritance, aggregation, and multiple inheritance. The author discusses the use of all three techniques in the production of a multirepresentational information retrieval system, Proteus. The present case study reviews the development of an application using inheritance, not an OOPL compiler. It is argued that, in at least some domains, multiple inheritance is a powerful tool with benefits that cannot be achieved using only single inheritance and aggregation