Delegation versus concatenation or cloning is inheritance too

Abstract

In this paper a simple prototype-based model of object-oriented programming is introduced. Unlike previous prototype-based systems, which use delegation to achieve incremental modification of objects, the suggested model is based on concatenation: linear composition of object interfaces. The model eliminates the notions of delegation and parent slots from prototype-based programming, and shows that the essence of object-oriented programming can be captured using only a small number of user-level language constructs.