Inheritance Without Types

At AlliedModders we dabble in practical language design. Our two major scripting projects, AMX Mod X and SourceMod, iterated on our own fork of a scrappy language called Pawn. Our next iteration is untyped, and we’re adding object support.

What does object support mean? “Well, obviously,” I naively thought, “it means Java-style implementation inheritance!” Whoops. WRONG. It turns out there’s a ton of complexity with inheritance once you take away types. This post is a brief survey of some popular untyped languages and what we ended up deciding.

The Goal
We want our language to have as few pitfalls as possible. I’m not sure if I stole this from Graydon Hoare, but our motto is “No surprises!” We want people to be able to write code that works the way they expect, minimizing random or unforeseen run-time failures.

A great aspect of C++’s inheritance is that information hiding is super easy. A base class’s behavior isn’t trampled by derived classes. For example:

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As you’d expect, this prints ‘5’. The fact that Derived also declares x does not trample on Base‘s own behavior. Now let’s take an untyped language, Python 3:

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This prints ’20’. In Python, “self” is really one object, with one set of properties and methods, whereas in the C++ model “this” is conceptually two objects, and “this” is statically typed to be the object of the containing class. I consider the Python model unappealing for two reasons:

  1. When adding a member to a derived class, you have to know that you’re not colliding with a member of your base class.
  2. When adding a member to a base class, you might be breaking any number of unknown consumers.

JavaScript’s prototype-based inheritance discourages this style, but JS is super flexible, and if you don’t mind a very, very inefficient prototype chain, you can do this:

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This prints “5”.

PHP’s Answer
For whatever reason, PHP takes Java’s model wholesale. Here’s an example:

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This prints ‘5’, which is what we want – and makes sense. But is $this statically typed to the Base class, like in C++? No:

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This prints "hello", so PHP’s $this retains some dynamicism. Let’s up the ante. What should this do?

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This prints true in both cases! For any property access in a PHP class function, if the object has that class on its inheritance chain, it uses the property on that class. Otherwise, it searches from the derived-most class back to the base class like normal. This implicitly hides variables on the derived object. Nonetheless it’s the right choice given the model, especially considering that it’s usually bad practice for a base class’s behavior to explicitly cast to one of its derived class.

Note that the fact that the inner x is private is actually irrelevant. Even if it were public, the base class should retain its behavior. Banning redeclaration works, though then you run the risk of potentially preventing an unknown consumer from compiling (albeit, better than silently being wrong). Similar issues occur with introducing new virtual functions or overloads.

So, what did we do?
After letting this all sink in, I decided to scrap inheritance as a feature of our next language iteration. Having objects alone will be a huge step forward, and we can evaluate use cases from there. I’m satisfied with this for a few reasons.

Inheritance is really complicated with types, and even more complicated without. And in an untyped language, it’s not even clear if implementation inheritance is useful. PHP’s interfaces and abstract classes seem verbose and heavyweight in comparison to JavaScript or Python, in return for a very small amount of static guarantees.

So far Pawn and our derivatives have mainly been embedded in games, and the majority of those games are based on the Half-Life engines (including Source). We want our object model to be compatible with the game’s internal object model, however, I’m not convinced that copying it would be ideal. The Source engine has the “Big-Ass Base Entity Class from which Everything Derives,” a painful and complex architecture continuing Source’s theme of not being scalable. Do we really want to encourage that?

I suspect we’ll end up with something like traits and/or composition, but for now, I’m content with keeping it simple and continuing to evaluate the strengths of other languages’ models.

(Addendum: I don’t much about Perl or Ruby. I tried quickly evaluating them for this post but the syntax was a little intimidating. I’d really appreciate insight into other languages.)

Addendum 2: SaberUK contributes this Ruby example which prints 20 – exhibiting similar behavior to Python.

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25 thoughts on “Inheritance Without Types”

  1. Powerlord

    So wait, SourcePawn will have objects now? You mean I don’t have to abuse Tries and the like any more? \o/

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