Using Prototypical Objects to Implement Shared Behavior

A traditional philosophical controversy between representing general concepts as abstract sets or classes and representing concepts as concrete prototypes is reflected in a controversy between two mechanisms for sharing behavior between objects in object oriented programming languages. Inheritance splits the object world into classes, which encode behavior shared among a group of instances, which represent individual members of these sets. The class/instance distinction is not needed if the alternative of using prototypes is adopted. A prototype represents the default behavior for a concept, and new objects can re-use part of the knowledge stored in the prototype by saying how the new object differs from the prototype. The prototype approach seems to hold some advantages for representing default knowledge, and incrementally and dynamically modifying concepts. Delegation is the mechanism for implementing this in object oriented languages. After checking its idiosyncratic behavior, an object can forward a message to prototypes to invoke more general knowledge. Because class objects must be created before their instances can be used, and behavior can only be associated with classes, inheritance fixes the communication patterns between objects at instance creation time. Because any object can be used as a prototype, and any messages can be forwarded at any time, delegation is the more flexible and general of the two techniques.