Implementation Inheritance

Inheritance Series Continued Part 2

Continuing on the previous entry, another interesting problem that can be solved be the use of multiple inheritance is Streams. When dealing with streams, we need to deal with streams from particular types of destinations and then we need to format the stream into data types so that higher level classes could handle in terms of specific data types.

To solve this problem using multiple inheritance we could imagine that we can have

1. Classes implementing a Stream interface on specific low level destinations such as file systems, network stream etc.
2. Classes implementing formatters which know how to format higher level data types such as integer, strings etc. These classes could inherit from low level stream classes to provide specialized classes that can stream data at higher levels of abstraction. For example, we could stream in strings, integers etc into file system streams, network connections etc.

In the above usage scenario of multiple inheritance, if we had "n" number of stream types, and then we had "m" number of data types, then typically we could have n*m number of combinations of inheritance. This provides us with great flexibility in implementation.

To be continued ...