[Grace-core] inheritance for stateless traits and beyond

[Andrew P Black]

On 22 Jun 2015, at 19:35 , Kim Bruce <kbbruce47 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm always cautious about multiple inheritance because I have never yet seen anyone do a good job with it in a programming language.  Eiffel did the best I've seen, yet it still has a lot of issues.  Perhaps others know languages that have done a better job.

I continue to believe that the traits system for Smalltalk did a good job.  The original ECOOP paper (and the later TOPLAS paper) discuss all of the problems with prior approaches and how traits solves them.  This was more than 10 years ago now.

Since then, roughly a dozen other languages have adopted some version of the traits solution.  In the spirit of Grace taking advantage of recent research on PLs, don't you think that we should look at this work, rather than pretending that it doesn't exist?

	Andrew