Inheritance was invented by the Simula language as a way to support intrusive lists, save memory, and simplify the garbage collector. It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula. The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look. Simplifying the garbage collector Simula created inheritance instead of using composition because it allowed their garbage collector to be simpler. Simula had a simple reference counting ...