The Inheritance Workshop

The Inheritance Workshop at ECOOP 2002, which took place on Tuesday, 11 June, was the first ECOOP workshop focusing on inheritance after the successful workshops in 1991 [41] and 1992 [48]. The workshop was intended as a forum for designers and implementers of object-oriented languages, and for software developers with an interest in inheritance. It was organized by Andrew P. Black, Erik Ernst, Peter Grogono, and Markku Sakkinen. Because of the size and diversity of the field, it is hard to come up with a litmus test for “object orientation”, but one of the most widely accepted ingredients is inheritance. Indeed, in his 1987 characterization of the language design space [58], Wegner made inheritance one of the two defining characteristics of object-orientation. Nevertheless, inheritance remains an active research area, because of problems like fragile base classes, the so-called inheritance anomaly, and the lack of encapsulation between a class and its subclasses. We believe the abundant activity demonstrates that inheritance is both hard to avoid and hard to get right. The goal of this workshop was to advance the state of the art in the design of inheritance mechanisms, and the judicious use of inheritance. The number of submissions confirmed the interest in this topic. We accepted 15 short position papers, written by a total of 28 authors from 11 different countries. We had particularly solicited reports from practitioners, but received contributions only from researchers. However, they represent so many different