OO Software Architecture - base class that everything inherits from. Bad/good idea?

Posted by ale on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by ale
Published on 2012-09-11T11:13:49Z Indexed on 2012/09/11 15:49 UTC
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Filed under:

object-oriented

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architecture

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programming-practices

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inheritance

I am reviewing a proposed OO software architecture that looks like this:

Base
- Foo
  - Something
- Bar
  - SomethingElse

Where Base is a static class.

My immediate thought was that every object in any class will inherit all the methods in Base which would create a large object. Could this cause problems for a large system? The whole architecture is hierarchical.. the 'tree' is much bigger than this really. Does this sort of architecture have a name (hierarchical?!). What are the known pros and cons?

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