A semantics of multiple inheritance (Q1106652)

The aim of this paper is to present a clean semantics of multiple inheritance and to show that, in the context of strongly typed, statically scoped languages, a sound typechecking algorithm exists. Multiple inheritance is also interpreted in a broad sense: instead of being limited to objects, it is extended in a natural way to union types and to higher-order functional types. This constitutes a semantic basis for the unification of functional and object-oriented programming. The first part of this paper is informal, and presents the basic notations and intuitions by means of examples. The second part is formal: it introduces a language, a semantics, a type-inference system, and a typechecking algorithm. The algorithm is proved sound with respect to the inference system, and the inference system is proved sound with respect to the semantics.