Eiffel for .NET part 2.
Following up the first part of Bertrand Meyer’s Eiffel.NET series
detailing how the Eiffel.NET compiler shoehorns multiple inheritance
into the .NET single inheritance model. As I suspected it’s a complete
hack. The base classes become interfaces with separate implementation
and creation classes. The consumer of the classes has to rely on
documentation rather than language features to understand how to
instantiate one of the base classes. The method Meyer described
implements polymorphism but does not allow for mixin functionality
which I presume has to be done via aggregation.

What the common object model provides is not a stranglehold forcing
all languages to support a single view, but a kind of language bus,
enabling all languages to cooperate by agreeing on a basic set of
common mechanisms. With the multiple inheritance example, we were able
to present to the bus, and hence to other languages, a view that
doesn’t lose any essential property of the original model.