Eliminating multiple inheritance

Question

I have the following problem and I'm wondering if there's a nice way to model these objects without using multiple inheritance. If it makes any difference, I am using Python.

Students need contact information plus student information. Adults need contact information plus billing information. Students can be adult students, in which case I need contact/student/billing info, or they can be children, in which case I need contact/student/parent info.

Just to be clear on how the system will be used, I need to be able to ask for a list of all adults (and I will get adult students plus parents), or a list of all students (and I will get child students plus adult students).

Also, all of these objects need to have a common base class.

Answer 1

As I'm sure someone else will comment soon (if they haven't already), one good OO principle is "Favor composition over inheritance". From your description, it sounds suspiciously like you're breaking the Single Responsibility Principle, and should be breaking down the functionality into separate objects.

It also occurs to me that Python supports duck typing, which begs the question "Why is it so important that all the classes have a common base class?"

Answer 2

What you have is an example of Role -- it's a common trap to model Role by inheritance, but Roles can change, and changing an object's inheritance structure (even in languages where it's possible, like Python) is not recommended. Children grow and become adults, and some adults will also be parents of children students as well as adult students themselves -- they might then drop either role but need to keep the other (their child changes schools but they don't, or viceversa).

Just have a class Person with mandatory fields and optional ones, and the latter, representing Roles, can change. "Asking for a list" (quite independently of inheritance or otherwise) can be done either by building the list on the fly (walking through all objects to check for each whether it meets requirements) or maintaining lists corresponding to the possible requirements (or a mix of the two strategies for both frequent and ad-hoc queries). A database of some sort is likely to help here (and most DBs work much better without inheritance in the way;-).