Implementing object class inheritance in Ada

Abstract The concept of inheritance of object‐oriented model is important in the analysis and design of software intensive systems as a mechanism for building abstractions, for reusing structural and functional information, and for closely modeling the real world. True object‐oriented programming languages are characterized as providing features for directly implementing inheritance models. Although Ada provides features that support other characteristics of object‐oriented designs (such as information hiding, encapsulation, and modularity), it does not directly support the inheritance model and, therefore, typically is referred to as an object‐oriented language. This paper discusses the importance of incorporating the inheritance into an Ada implementation. Our approach seeks to preserve the important qualities of the inheritance model while using only the standard features of Ada without using preprocessors and specialized object‐oriented runtime environments. The approach is evaluated in terms of under...