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The ISA Relationship

You may hear sometimes people speak of the ISA relationship. The source of this terminology is more fundamental than you may at first suspect.

Object-oriented designers often strive to use inheritance to model relationships where a derived class ``is a kind of'' the base class. For example, a lady "is a kind of" human. A wife ``is a kind of'' lady etc.

This relationship is called the ISA relationship.



Olexiy Ye. Tykhomyrov 2001-12-16