Object-Orientation FAQ

Multiple Inheritance brings up the possibility for a class to appear as a
parent more than once in a class graph (repeated inheritance), and there is
then a potential to share that class.  Only one instance of the class will
then appear in the graph (as is always the case in CLOS, because all *members*
with the same name will be shared (receive a single slot) with the greatest
common subtype as its type).  C++ provides an alternative, where only parents
specified as virtual (virtual bases) are shared within the same class lattice,
allowing both shared and non-shared occurrences of a parent to coexist.  All
"features" in Eiffel (C++ members) of a repeated parent that are not to be
shared must be renamed "along an inheritance path", else they are shared by
default.  This allows a finer granularity of control and consistent name
resolution but requires more work for parents with many features.