Question

Lets take an example in C#

public class Foo {     public Foo() { }     public Foo(int j) { } }  public class Bar : Foo {  } 

Now, All the public members of Foo is accessible in Bar except the constructor. I cannot do something like

Bar bb = new Bar(1); 

Why the constructors are not inheritable?

UPDATE

I do understand we can chain constructors, but I would like to know why the above construct is not valid. I am sure there should be a valid reason for it.

Answer 1

Constructors are not inheritable because it might cause weird and unintended behavior. More specifically, if you added a new constructor to a base class, all derived classes get an instance of that constructor. That’s a bad thing in some cases, because maybe your base class specifies parameters that don’t make sense for your derived classes.

A commonly given example for this is that in many languages, the base class for all objects (commonly called ‘Object’) has a constructor with no parameters. If constructors were inherited, this would mean that all objects have a parameterless constructor, and there’s no way to say ‘I want people who make an instance of this class to provide parameters X, Y and Z, otherwise their code shouldn’t compile.’ For many classes, it’s important that certain parameters be defined for their proper function, and making constructors non-heritable is part of the way that class authors can guarantee that some parameters are always defined.

Edit to respond to comments: Ramesh points out that if constructors were inherited as he would like them to be, he could always override base class constructors using privately declared constructors in each derived class. That is certainly true, but there it a logistical problem with this strategy. It requires that writers of derived classes have to watch base classes closely and add a private constructor if they want block inheritance of the base class constructor. Not only is this a lot of work for people writing derived classes, this kind of implicit dependency across classes is exactly the sort of thing that can cause weird behavior.

Ramesh – it’s not that what you describe would be impossible to add to a language. In general it’s not done because that sort of behavior could confuse people and lead to a lot of extra debugging and code writing.

Quintin Robinson provides some very worthwhile responses to this question in the comments that are definitely worth reading.