2.7.5 Multiple Inheritance of Fields

In other languages with multiple inheritance, in addition to the possibility of name clashes for methods, the possibility exists for name clashes for instance variables. Some languages maintain separate copies of instance variables inherited from different classes, while other languages merge like-named instance variables together in the subclass. The situation is simpler in Cecil, since all access to instance variables is through field accessor methods. An object (conceptually at least) maintains space for each inherited copy-down field, independently of their names (distinct fields with the same name are not merged automatically). Accesses to these fields are mediated by their accessor methods, and the normal multiple inheritance rules are used to resolve any ambiguities among like-named field accessor methods. In particular, a method in the child with the same name as a field accessor method could send directed resend messages (described later in section 2.8) to access the contents of one or the other of the ambiguous fields.