Re: I don't think inheritance is essential

[robot_tourist]

IMO your point number two is pretty fundamental to object orientation and is a very good one-line synopsis, you take a class and extend it by adding functionality, but keeping all the stuff you don't want to re-invent. And it gives you a nice tree to draw when you are designing your system.

Personally, I can't think of a good reason not to use inheritance.

[chromatic]

Personally, I can't think of a good reason not to use inheritance.

I can. It encourages code reuse along the wrong lines, caring more about position in an arbitrary (and quite possibly wrong hierarchy) than about the capabilities of the class.

That's why Perl 6 encourages the use of roles.

[sri]

Yes, multiple inheritance is quite lame for mixin style programming, but try to think a bit more abstract.
The important part is that we use it in combination with NEXT for AOP like programming, think AspectJ without static trigger points!


package Foo;

use base qw/Bar::Unicode Bar/;

__PACKAGE__->prepare_parameters;


package Bar;

sub prepare_parameters {
    my $class = shift;

    # initialize parameters...
}


package Bar::Unicode;

use NEXT;

sub prepare_parameters {
    my $class = shift;

    # let parent initialize parameters
    $class->NEXT::prepare_parameters;

    # utf8 encode parameters...
}

Hope this makes it a bit clearer.