Why aren't classes sealed by default?

Question

I was just wondering, since the sealed keyword's existence indicates that it's the class author's decision as to whether other classes are allowed to inherit from it, why aren't classes sealed by default, with some keyword to mark them explicitly as extensible?

I know it's somewhat different, but access modifiers work this way. With the default being restrictive and fuller access only being granted with the insertion of a keyword.

There's a large chance that I haven't thought this through properly, though, so please be humane!

Answer 1

I see two simple reasons:

1. Inheritance is a foundational principle of OO, so disallowing it by default wouldn't be intuitive.
2. The majority of classes are designed to allow inheritance, so allowing inheritance by default saves typing.

Answer 2

I can't recall having heard a rationale for the decision to have classes not sealed by default. However, there are certainly quite a few people who believe that C# should have been spec'ed to have sealed be the default:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/01/05/rambling-on-the-sealed-keyword.aspx

Answer 3

sealed classes prevent inheritance and therefore are an OO abombination. see this rant for details ;-)

Answer 4

You could probably make just as many arguments in favor of sealed-by-default as you could against it. If it were the other way around, someone would be posting the opposite question.

Answer 5

Merely deriving from an unsealed class dosen't change the class's behavior. The worst that can happen is that a new version of the base class will add a member with the same name as the deriving class (in which case there will just be a compiler warning saying you should use the new or override modifier) or the base class is sealed (which is a design no-no if the class has already been released into the wild). Arbitrary sublassing still complies with the Liskov Substitution Principle.

The reason that members are not overridable by default in C# is that because overriding a method can change the base class's behaviour in a way that the base class's author didn't anticipate. By making it explicitly abstract or virtual, it's saying that the author is aware that that it can change or is otherwise beyond their control and the author should have taken this into account.

Answer 6

I'd say it was just a mistake. I know many people (including myself) who believe that classes should indeed be sealed by default. There are at least a couple of people in the C# design team in that camp. The pendulum has swung somewhat away from inheritance since C# was first designed. (It has its place, of course, but I find myself using it relatively rarely.)

For what it's worth, that's not the only mistake along the lines of being too close to Java: personally I'd rather Equals and GetHashCode weren't in object, and that you needed specific Monitor instances for locking too...

Answer 7

In my opinion there should be no default syntax, that way you always write explicitly what you want. This forces the coder to understand/think more.

If you want a class to be inheritable then you write

public extensible class MyClass

otherwise

public sealed class MyClass

BTW I think the same should go with access modifiers, disallow default access modifiers.

Answer 8

80% of the features of Word go unused. 80% of classes don't get inherited from. In both cases, once in a while, someone comes along and wants to use or reuse a feature. Why should the original designer prohibit reuse? Let the reuser decide what they want to reuse.

Answer 9

For the same reason why objects are not private by default

or

to be consistent with the object analogue, which is objects are not private by default

Just guessing, coz at the end of the day it's a language's design decision and what the creators say is the canon material.