On Mar 26, 2010, at 10:49 AM, kj wrote:
What's the word on using "classes as namespaces"? E.g.
class _cfg(object):
spam = 1
jambon = 3
huevos = 2
breakfast = (_cfg.spam, _cfg.jambon, _cfg.huevos)
Granted, this is not the "intended use" for classes, and therefore
could be viewed as a misuse ("that's what dictionaries are for",
etc.). But other than this somewhat academic objection[*], I really
can see no problem with using classes in this way.
And yet, I've come across online murky warnings against using
classes as "pseudo-namespaces". Is there some problem that I'm
not seeing with this technique?
I hope it's not problematic; I use it all the time.
A few differences about the way I do it:
- I respect PEP 8 for the class name (CamelCaps)
- If the attributes are supposed to be constants, I capitalize the
attributes
- I often add NONE with a value of zero so that bool(MyClass.NONE)
will evaluate to False and everything else will be True
Here's an example from my code:
class Apodization(object):
""" Apodization constants """
# These constants are arbitrary and may change.
# However bool(NONE) is guaranteed to be False
NONE = 0
GAUSSIAN = 1
LORENTZIAN = 2
Cheers
Philip
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