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Decide: multiple inheritance — C3, delegate, or leave refused?

Escalated 2026-08-07 from [[bug-nilpy-multiple-inheritance-does-not-parse]], whose cheap half (a diagnostic naming the constraint instead of "unexpected token") already landed. What is left is not a bug fix, it is a design choice, so it should not be made by whoever happens to pick the ticket up.

The fork

The underlying Pascal object model is single-inheritance, so a second base cannot be a real parent. Three options, from that ticket:

  1. Full C3 linearisation. Flatten the MRO at compile time and resolve each attribute to the winning definition. Correct for the diamond (D(B, C) with both deriving from A must resolve D, B, C, A), and the most work.
  2. Second base as a delegate. Real inheritance from the first base; attributes not found there forward to an embedded instance of the second. Handles the mixin idiom, which is what most real code uses it for. Gets the diamond wrong exactly where C3 would pick C over an inherited-from-A member of B.
  3. Stay refused. Today's behaviour: a clear diagnostic telling the reader to use single inheritance or compose.

What is NOT in question

Silently accepting the comma and ignoring the second base is ruled out by the ticket already — it turns a compile error into a wrong method being called at run time.

Why it needs you

The trade is between coverage of real Python (mixins are common; option 2 buys most of it cheaply) and not shipping a subtly wrong MRO (option 2 is observably wrong in the diamond, which is exactly where someone would trust it). Option 3 is honest and free but keeps blocking corpus work.

This is a how much Python do we mean to be question, which is the sort devdocs/dev/nilpy-semantics-divergences.md says belongs to you, not a lane agent picking the reachable option.

Recommendation

Option 2 (delegate) with the diamond REFUSED. Take the mixin case, which is the one real code needs, and keep the compile error for the shape where the delegate model would be wrong (two bases sharing an ancestor). That yields no silently wrong answers, unblocks the common idiom, and leaves a clean upgrade path to C3 later — the refusal becomes dead code rather than something to undo.

Unblocks: [[bug-nilpy-multiple-inheritance-does-not-parse]].

DECIDED 2026-08-08 (user): FLATTEN at compile time

flattening sounds sane

class D(B, C): is accepted by copying C's methods into D, compiled with self = D, with conflicts resolved in C3 left-to-right order (B wins over C). No delegation, no runtime dispatch, no reflective lookup — the observable behaviour of C3 produced entirely at compile time, which is the compiler-shaped answer.

The delegate option is WITHDRAWN, and why matters

The earlier recommendation on this ticket was delegate-with-the-diamond-refused. That was wrong and is retracted: delegation breaks the main mixin idiom, because in Python a mixin's self IS the derived object.

class ReprMixin:
    def __repr__(self):
        return f"{type(self).__name__}({self.value})"   # self.value lives on D

With an embedded C instance, self is the mixin and self.value does not exist. Reaching back into the derived object is why mixins exist, so delegation handles only the mixins that need nothing from their host. Flattening gets this right by construction — the body is compiled against D.

The interface idea: right instinct, and RTTI already supports it

Asked whether the second base could be treated as an interface. As a shortcut it does not pay — an interface is a contract with no bodies, while a mixin is bodies with no state, so it supplies the type and none of the code. But as a second layer for IDENTITY it is exactly right, and the runtime side already exists:

What is missing is only frontend-side: NilPy never creates an interface (UClsIsInterface has ZERO references in pyparser.inc) and isinstance walks the parent chain via IsSubclassOf without consulting the interface table.

Correctness — the known divergences from CPython

CPython marks this with __bases__ (direct bases) and __mro__ (the C3 linearisation); isinstance/issubclass walk tp_mro, attribute lookup walks __mro__, and super() uses __mro__ plus the current class's position.

Flattening is correct for method resolution and state on a non-diamond mixin, and diverges here — all of it detectable at COMPILE time, which satisfies the standing detect-and-halt-or-diagnose rule:

  1. isinstance(d, C) / issubclass(D, C) answer False (CPython: True). The divergence, and precisely what the later interface layer fixes.
  2. super() cooperative chains break. On a D(B, C), CPython sends B.__init__'s super().__init__() to C; a flattened body goes to B's own base. super().__init__(**kwargs) chaining is idiomatic in mixin-heavy code, so this needs a diagnostic, not silence.
  3. type(d).__bases__ / __mro__ introspection answers wrong.
  4. Conflict order must follow C3 left-to-right — implementable exactly, but must not be left to accident.
  5. Diamond with state: C3 gives ONE shared A; naive flattening can give two. This is the concrete reason the diamond is refused in v1.
  6. Class-level attributes on the mixin must be copied too, and that lands on the class-attribute lowering (shared slot vs copy-at-construction) reworked 2026-08-07 — check the interaction, do not assume it.

Scope agreed

v1: flatten; refuse the diamond (two bases sharing an ancestor); diagnose super() across a flattened base. Nothing silently wrong.

Later, separable: synthesise an interface per flattened base so isinstance(d, C) answers True and a D can be passed where a C is expected, riding the existing RTTI interface table and IMT rather than new machinery.

Unblocks [[bug-nilpy-multiple-inheritance-does-not-parse]], which should be re-scoped to this plan (its own option list predates the decision).

2026-09-19 — measured on That Space Program (frankH): which divergence decides the diamond

tsp/ephem/__init__.py:17, class EphemerisMissing(EphemerisError, FileNotFoundError), with EphemerisError(Exception) and a docstring-only body. It is the first wall for 14 of TSP's 66 modules (TSP 13eb601, after f96cbaab9).

Constraint for the RTTI dropper (d9ed3131a priced it; unbuilt). Once flattened bases are recorded in the RTTI blob and __pxxInheritsFrom follows them, isinstance/except/as DEPEND on those entries. The dropper's liveness analysis must treat a class's flattened-base entries as reachable wherever the class is, or it removes exactly what an except clause reads. The entries are emitted fully at compile time: RTTI is read-only by default in hosted executables (c19d88414), so nothing may patch them at run time.

LANDED 2026-09-19 (frankH): flattened bases are bases, and the diamond is narrowed