Inheritance composition is a programming method that includes an instance of an object within another object to establish dynamic relationships. It provides well-defined boundaries and a less restrictive framework for program design. Composition can prevent deep inheritance trees and serialization difficulties.
Inheritance compounding is a programming methodology used in object-oriented programming languages to help establish more dynamic and changeable relationships between objects in an application. The basic format for inheritance composition is the inclusion of an instance of an object within another object. This is markedly different from the object-oriented inheritance method, but can serve the same purpose in many patterns. Advantages of composition over inheritance include well-defined boundaries between compound objects and wrapper objects, the ability to change an object’s implementation without affecting an entire inheritance hierarchy, and a less restrictive framework for initial program design . Some of the complications, however, could include serialization difficulties and overly complex structures in large, established programs.
In object-oriented programming, one of the traits that is important to establish during design is how different objects relate to each other. Inheritance is a central mechanism in object-oriented programming and allows an object to inherit all data and methods from its parent, which it can then add to, modify, or extend with its own implementation. An example of inheritance-based design might be a program that has a main class that defines a car and models some generic attributes of all cars. The class for each individual make of car is then created as a descendant of the parent class but defines specific information, such as engine displacement, fuel capacity, or other information specific to that particular make of car.
Composition is expressed by including instances of objects within other objects. If there is a main class that defines a generic car, instead of subclassing specific car makes, the main class might instead contain instances of other objects that define the car more specifically. This could mean that the main car class could contain an object for engine type and one for fuel capacity, which would be set when the class is used to instantiate a specific make of car.
With composition over inheritance, objects contained in the main class are not directly related to the main class, giving developers the freedom to change how individual objects work. One problem that composition on inheritance can help prevent is a situation where an inheritance tree can be excessively deep, meaning that any change to a class in the tree could require changes along the length of the tree. Not all object-oriented languages support multiple inheritance, and compounding on inheritance is one method that can be used to get around this restriction.
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