> As far as I can tell, in most OO languages, there's no reason why classes must use inheritance, though I am certainly willing to be schooled in that regard.
That there is no precise definition of what a class is and isn't, and that the traditional notion of a class conflates several independent concepts, is precisely the big criticism! To my mind "traditional classes" means inheritance, and recent languages without inheritance (Rust or Go) have tended to not use the term "class".
That there is no precise definition of what a class is and isn't, and that the traditional notion of a class conflates several independent concepts, is precisely the big criticism! To my mind "traditional classes" means inheritance, and recent languages without inheritance (Rust or Go) have tended to not use the term "class".