Mixin classes and single/multiple inheritance

[Michele Simionato]

On Sep 20, 5:41 am, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-s... at benfinney.id.au>
wrote:
> Michele Simionato <michele.simion... at gmail.com> writes:
> > Ben Finney wrote:
> > > What do you see as an appropriate use of mixin classes, and what
> > > an abuse?
>
> > An example of fine usage of mixin is Tkinter; an example of bad
> > usage if Zope 2.
>
> Which parts of those two very large code sets do I need to look at to
> see the examples you have in mind? I was hoping you could demonstrate
> with short code examples.

Unfortunately you see the issue only when you program in
the large. Take for instance the Plone BaseContent class; I believe
its MRO contains something like 35 classes (I don't remember
the exact number now) in a multiple inheritance hierarchy.
Instances have some something like 400+ methods and attributes.
Now try to understand from which of the parent classes the
attributes came. For Tkinter things are much easier, see
the effbot "Introduction to Tkinter" for a discussion of
the mixin classes it uses.  Then try something like
inspect.getmro(Tkinter.Label) , there are only 7 classes
in the hierarchy. Notice that even with single inheritance
you can run in deep hierarchies (Java docet).The problem,
as Guido once said, is the "inheritance is overrated".

   Michele Simionato