Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ames!lll-tis!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!neil
From: neil@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Neil Haddley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Software Reuse
Message-ID: <550@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Aug 88 11:14:32 GMT
Reply-To: neil@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Neil Haddley)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 27

All,

This mail is a request for an informed opinion on what is to me a 
complex issue. What I hope will result is a generally accepted position
of the form:

"The majority of regular Smalltalk programmers would agree that ..."

The point at issue:

"The Inheritance mechanism of Smalltalk and other Object-Oriented
programming languages provides significant support for code level
Software Reuse"

My current tentative opinion is that this is in fact not the case. 

Although it does allow for nice structuring of code, through the use of
Abstract Classes etc, it does not provide any advantage over other code
level reuse mechanisms, such as Generic Abstract Types.

Comments would be welcome, and I will post any interesting results on
the net, thank you.

Neil
-- 
EMAIL:	neil@comp.lancs.ac.uk		| Post: University of Lancaster,
UUCP:	...!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!neil	|	Department of Computing,
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