On Thu, 7 Apr 2022 at 15:41, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
if proudgobelin and corruptegobelin are published by a game_engine library, the game_engine user would most likely not be aware (nor should he care) that they both inherit from a same parent.
If someone is going to munge those classes together using MI, they'd better learn everything they possibly can about them. It's a delicate operation that requires knowing a *lot* about the classes you're blending together.
In this case, the fact that both class names have the form <adjective>Gobelin would make me suspect quite strongly that they *do* have some common ancestry.
I'm curious when you would ever be subclassing something from another library without knowing its hierarchy. For instance, it's quite common to subclass a GTK object to create your own functionality (subclass Window to create MyApplicationWindow, subclass HButtonBox to create BoxOfMyButtons, etc), but the docs are very clear about what each class's hierarchy is - it's a vital part of the API. The idea that someone would MI two classes from the same library and not know that they inherit from the same thing is a little odd IMO. ChrisA