Reusability Through Fine-grain Inheritance

Object-oriented languages are often promoted as encouraging the production of flexible, reusable software. Unfortunately, experience suggests that although individual classes may be reusable, large class libraries seem to lack flexibility in the face of circumstances unforeseen by the designer. This paper explores the problems associated with flexibility and reuse in large libraries, and shows how fine-grain inheritance can alleviate some of these problems. A methodology for designing fine-grain inheritance graphs is proposed and a detailed case study is presented.