Kent Johnson wrote:
Why do you say this is 'cheaty'? A class is basically a collection of data (state) and functions to operate on that state.
Sorry for the delay, real world work got in the way ...
Well I understand classes to be used when multiple instances are required, I will only need one instance and as such it seemed a bit of a cheat, The trouble is I now pretty well understand the tools, but don't know how you guys use them in the real world.
For what it's worth, it seems to me to be perfectly normal to have classes that are only ever intended to have a single instance. For example, you're never likely to need more than one HTML parser, and yet htmllib.HTMLParser is a class...
As Kent said, the main point of a class is that you have a collection of data and operations on that data bundled together. Whether you have one set of data to operate on, or many such sets, is mostly irrelevant (though classes are even more valuable when there *are* many sets of data). Defining a class isn't so much a statement that "I want lots of things like this", as it is a declaration of modularity -- "This stuff all belongs together as a unit".
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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