Legacy 5 Thoughts

Go to Root Class Object
Internal Inheritance
Object inheritance
Root Class -- Object
This object is inherited by all other objects in the system. Its purpose in life is to serve as a common ancestor for container classes to hang onto, and to provide the minimum required functionality for all objects. This includes a few methods and flags -- load time of the object for purposes of garbage collection, unique identifier, object type id, attribute list(s), and method pointers.
An attribute list must contain the following methods:
Furthermore, the Object provides methods for writing out (serialization) and reading back in an entire object, to the Storage Medium [tm]. Source level class inheritance
Some rudimentary inheritance occurs in the source code. All game objects descend from the root class Object, whcih has no parents. A Player, is a Living, is a Object, for instance. A Room is a Container, is a Object. I really hope Guile can be embedded into C++, else I'll have to fudge something.
Object level (game) inheritance
The game tracks object relationships; this is needed for memory efficiency and to keep game mechanics simple. When a Room pops, its contents are found and they are also popped. A popped object is merely a reference to its Template. When a change is attempted, that template is copied (or its relevant portions copied). We therefore have object inheritance so that (say) a Priest could be descended from a Human, descended from some basic Living which knows how to wander, etc. This promotes code reuse and keeps design clean. However, a Priest must have a template object defining all of this -- when a Priest pops, its a coy of the template.