Dynamic inheritance

• Assigning to a parent slot changes the inherited behavior of an object.

• Usually used to switch between states where behavior is significantly different.

• Use with caution!

Dynamic inheritance

Using dynamic inheritance, an object can change one or more of its parents during execution.

Typically, this is used when an object can be in one of a small number of discrete states, each having significantly different behavior from the others. An example is the object unix, which represents the Unix system call interface. It has a dynamic parent, currentOsVariant, which can be set to an object containing behavior specific to a particular variant of Unix; this is done every time the system is started.

Dynamic inheritance should be used with caution: it is easy to construct programs which are very hard to understand!