Inheritance is only from the derived class to its parent class (or, the subclass inherits from its superclass). The relation reusulted from derivation cannot be changed at runtime (at least, not in VFP).

An object contained by an other object cannot inherit from the container. In this case, we talk about composition.

In VFP, you can use PEMSTATUS() to test for the existance of a property or method. TYPE() can also be used to test for the existance of properties. Using these functions, the contained object can test if specific properties/methods are defined for its container, and, if they are there, the contained object can use them. Although this is not inheritance, it's extremly powerful and it can be used to implement really cool mechanisms.

Vlad