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by TylerE 3685 days ago
But isn't that sort of the point? Traits aren't multiple inheritance.
3 comments

O think there is a problem with multiple inheritance being somewhat ill-defined.

I recall reading OOSC[0], where Meyer showed that MI in Eiffel is fine, and it basically boiled down to: when there is an ambiguity, force the child class to rename the conflicting methods/redefine them, which is very close to what the original traits paper[1] suggests (bar state in traits, IIRC).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-Oriented_Software_Const... [1] http://www.ptidej.net/courses/ift6251/fall06/presentations/0...

There are multiple meanings of traits flying around in different languages. Some traits are type classes (Rust), some traits are mixins (Scala). The former are not really related to class-based inheritance, while the latter most definitely is (linearized multiple inheritance as defined by Cook & Bracha, not the mixins of CommonLisp). Self and smalltalk style traits are even more different.
Don't forget C++ traits, which are more like a design pattern.
CS papers about it might disagree.