Inheritance (object-oriented Programming) - Limitations and Alternatives

Limitations and Alternatives

Using inheritance extensively in designing a program imposes certain constraints.

For example, consider a class Person that contains a person's name, address, phone number, age, gender, and race. We can define a subclass of Person called Student that contains the person's grade point average and classes taken, and another subclass of Person called Employee that contains the person's job-title, employer, and salary.

In defining this inheritance hierarchy we have already defined certain restrictions, not all of which are desirable.

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