2007 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Inheritance and Delegation
Published in:
Object-Oriented Programming Languages: Interpretation
Inheritance in its simplest form is performed by classes in class-based programming languages. Languages based upon prototypes support a mechanism called delegation which appears to be more general and, in some ways, more fundamental than inheritance. Inheritance, though, is an extremely important concept and is found in many computer systems (the X-windows system, for example), as well as object-oriented languages.