John Salerno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From my brief experience with C#, I learned that it was pretty standard >practice to put each class in a separate file. I assume this is a >benefit of a compiled language that the files can then be grouped together. > >What I'm wondering is how is this normally handled in Python? Is it >normal for classes to be put in separate modules? It seems like this can >get out of hand, since modules are separate from one another and not >compiled together. You'd end up with a lot of import statements. > >Are related classes put into a single module then? Or is there some >recommended method for how to handle this?
There are two different issues here. One is how you organize your source code, the other is what API you expose to the user. >From the source code point of view, I will generally put a single class in each file, but there are exceptions (no pun intended). If I've got a bunch of very closely related classes, especially if they're small, I'll put more than one class in a file. How small is small? There's no hard number, but anything that's got more than a couple of methods is probably not small. Exception classes certainly don't get their own file; they get put in the module where they make the most sense. >From the API point of view, just because you split your classes up into multiple modules, doesn't mean the user has to see that complexity. Have one top level module which imports the others. The user only has to import the top level one. There's no magic answer here. To give you a real example, I just took a look at a recent project I did. I've got 8 python source files, totalling 1505 lines. I define 14 classes, of which 7 are exception classes. My top level module (the one a user would import) has no classes defined in it; it imports the other modules and has a bunch of factory functions. I looked at the one file that contains two real classes; one of them is essentially an inner class and has only two methods; __init__() and __call__(), both of which are trivial. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
