What Is Dynamic Inheritance?
Dynamic inheritance allows objects to change and evolve over time. Since base classes provide properties and attributes for objects, changing base classes changes the properties and attributes of a class. A previous example was a window changing into an icon and then back again, which involves changing a base class between a window and icon class. More specifically, dynamic inheritance refers to the ability to add, delete, or change parents from objects (or classes) at run-time. Actors, CLOS, and Smalltalk provide dynamic inheritance in some form or other. Single hierarchy systems, such as Self, provide dynamic inheritance in the form of delegation [Ungar 87]. See also [Kim 89, chs 1, 3] for a discussion and [Coplien 92] for some implementation discussion in C++. See also the following article on Dynamic Inheritance, which provides examples.
