[knome]

I'll readily admit the languages were marketed that way, but would argue inheritance was a functional, but poor, imitation of dynamic message dispatch. Interfaces, structural typing, or even simply swapping out object types in a language with dynamic types does better for enabling function-based message passing than inheritance does, as they avoid the myriad pitfalls and limitations associated with the technique.

Dynamic dispatch can be accomplished in any language with a function type by using a structure full of functions to dispatch the incoming invocations, as Linux does in C to implement its file systems.