Disadvantages of Inheritence

Hi,

Till now I have never thought as Inheritence will also have some disadvantages. But I tried to find the other side of complexity of inheritance and I get to know many other details which you might be knowing but have never noticed it.

• Inheritance results in a very tight binding between a superclass and its subclasses.

• Removing or swapping out a superclass will usually break subclasses. Subclasses are entirely dependant on their superclass to function effectively.

• It's inflexible. You are burdened by methods and behavior defined in a more general superclass, making down-the-line changes and customization difficult. Decisions made early on haunt the entire class hierarchy. See the fragile base class problem. [1]

• Inheritance relationships generally can't be altered at runtime.

• In many OOP languages, you can only inherit from a single class without introducing the problems associated with multiple inheritance. This can be restrictive. For example, if you have a Person class, with the subclasses Student and Employee. What if you have a person who is both a Student and an Employee?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fra...

Hope this little thing might have given you a chance to look at the world of oops in a different manner.