[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Inheritance

• From: "Mark L. Fussell" <fussellm@a...>
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 02:37:31 -0800 (PST)

Paul, 

No argument with your posting (I decided not to post a similar statement 
after rereading yours), but could you change your terms slightly?  
Although the OO terms themselves were definitely conflated during the 
eighties they have by now settled down to:

    Type:  The declaration of the interface of any set of [objects] that 
conforms to this common protocol. Any set of objects or values 
with similar behavior... [Firesmith+E 95] 

    Class:  A class is the realization of a type. [UML]  The idea of 
class is closely linked...with the description of implementation details 
of software objects [Cook+D 94].

    Type vs. Class: Types classify objects according to a common 
interface; classes classify objects according to a common implementation. 
[Firesmith+E 95] 

    Subtyping: The incremental definition of a new type in terms of one 
or more existing types, whereby the subtype conforms to all of its 
supertypes [an is-kind-of relationship] [Firesmith+E 95]

And subclassing implies implementation-inheritance (i.e. code reuse), 
exactly what you were trying to avoid implying.

So I would suggest rewriting your example to:

> > Anyhow, you can emulate OTHER using subtyping without an explicit 
> > OTHER construct.
> > 
> > <!ELEMENT CITATION (name, author, date, OTHER-CIT* )>
> > <!ELEMTYPE OTHER-CIT> <!-- no constraints on subtypes -->
> > <!ELEMTYPE ANOTHER-TYPE ISA ANY>  <!-- Be explicit about the 
automatic root -->
> > 
> > <!ELEMENT URL (#PCDATA) ISA (OTHER-CIT & ANOTHER-TYPE)>

Which makes it use the standard terminology. 

So, ELEMENTs would be the leaves of a tree/digraph of Types with ANY as
the root.  Note that ISA should formally be IS-A-KIND-OF but that is an
annoyingly long keyword.  (My dog is-a Dog which is-a-kind-of Mammal vs:
My dog is-a Dog which is-a Mammal). 

--Mark
mark.fussell@c...

  i   ChiMu Corporation      Architectures for Information
 h M   info@c...         Object-Oriented Information Systems
C   u    www.chimu.com         Architecture, Frameworks, and Mentoring



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i...
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Inheritance
    • From: james anderson <mecom-gmbh@m...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Integrity in the Hands of the Client
• Next by Date: XDEV proposals (was Re: Recipes for Information)
• Previous by thread: Sequence <was> Access Languages ...
• Next by thread: Re: Inheritance
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread