It is possible to determine, at run time, what classes are defined, how they are related by inheritance, what class an object belongs to, etc. This section describes the predicates used for those purposes. Most of the predicates involve the class hierarchy, so they are properly described in the section on inheritance. But, several can be useful even in programs that use only simple classes.
Most of these predicates come in pairs, where one predicate involves
one class or its direct superclasses, and the other predicate involves
all ancestors. For example, the class_superclass/2 and
class_ancestor/2 predicates connect a currently defined class to
its superclass(es) and to all its ancestors, respectively.
In all of these predicates, the ancestors of a class include not only superclasses and their ancestors, but also the class itself. A class cannot be a superclass of itself, by the rules of defining classes. However, it is convenient to consider every class an ancestor of itself, because then we may say that every property of a class is defined in one of its ancestors, without having to say "the class itself or a superclass or a superclass of a superclass, etc."