On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Bob Gailer wrote:
Whenever you find yourself writing an if statement ask whether this would be better handled by subclasses. Whenever you find yourself about to write a global statement, consider making the variables properties of a class.
Bob --
Brian already asked for an explanation of your first statement, and I found the ensuing discussion very instructive.
Can you explain the second? As an aesthetic point, I hate globals, and I'd love a discussion with some examples of using class variables as a way of avoiding this.
Terry
Hi Terry and all,
I'm probably not the best person to explain this, but I've got a use case that might help illustrate.
The thing that finally got me to write my first Class statement was a procedural program where I had a hard to find bug.
I wrote a debug_report function which would print out an informative report about the state of all the objects I suspected were implicated in the bug. Then, I put debug_report calls at the suspicious places. But, my procedural code had function call chains 4 or 5 links deep, and at no level did any of the functions have access to all of the objects of interest.
To make it work in purely procedural, I had to either make many objects global or litter my functions with passing objects up and down as parameters that weren't needed for the function's tasks, but simply so debug_report could see them.
I made a class, put my functions in it, and suddenly, they all could `see' the objects of interest without the passing and returning of objects just for the sake of visibility. Some `self's sprinkled around did the work instead.
So, even if you don't make use of further OOP features (as I am learning to do on other threads), classes give you a namespace option between globals and locals -- `continentals' if you like ;-)
HTH, and looking forward to more expert explanations,
Brian vdB
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