Recently one of my friend appeared for an interview and after few so called easy questions he was asked "Why multiple inheritance is not supported in Java" , though he has a brief idea that in Java we can support multiple inheritance in java via interface but interviewer was keep pressing on why part , may be he was just read any blog post about it :). So after the interview my friend comes to me and in usual talk he told me about this questions and ask me the answer. Well this is very classical question like Why String is immutable in Java; similarity between these two questions is they are mainly driven by design decision taken by java's creator or designer. Though following two reason make sense to me on Why Java doesn't support multiple inheritances:
Why Java doesn't support multiple inheritance
1) First reason is ambiguity around Diamond problem, consider a class A has foo() method and then B and C derived from A and has there own foo() implementation and now class D derive from B and C using multiple inheritance and if we refer just foo() compiler will not be able to decide which foo() it should invoke. This is also called Diamond problem because structure on this inheritance scenario is similar to 4 edge diamond, see below
A foo() / \ / \ foo() B C foo() \ / \ / D foo()In my opinion even if we remove the top head of diamond class A and allow multiple inheritances we will see this problem of ambiguity.
Some times if you give this reason to interviewer he asks if C++ can support multiple inheritance than why not Java. hmmmmm in that case I would try to explain him the second reason which I have given below that its not because of technical difficulty but more to maintainable and clearer design was driving factor though this can only be confirmed by any of java designer and we can just speculate. Wikipedia link has some good explanation on how different language address problem arises due to diamond problem while using multiple inheritances.
2) Second and more convincing reason to me is that multiple inheritances does complicate the design and creates problem during casting, constructor chaining etc and given that there are not many scenario on which you need multiple inheritance its wise decision to omit it for the sake of simplicity. Also java avoids this ambiguity by supporting single inheritance with interfaces. Since interface only have method declaration and doesn't provide any implementation there will only be just one implementation of specific method hence there would not be any ambiguity.
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