On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Christopher Arndt wrote:
>> I have a general question about programming. My program that I have
>> been writing is fully modularized. My question is: Is there a
>> programming technique that would alleviate the passing of a huge number
>> of variables.
One of the things we can do is to try to group related values together
into structures. In Python, classes act as a way to glue related data
together.
For example, let's say we have a program that deals with drawing shapes
like circles. One way we could imagine doing this is to represent a
circle as an x/y coordinate, a radius, and a color. In this situation,
things that work on circles will take in at least those three arguments:
########################################################
def draw_circle(x, y, radius, color):
...
########################################################
But another way to look at this is to say that there is a single thing
called a Circle with three properties: center_x, center_y, radius, and
color:
########################################################
class Circle:
def __init__(self, x, y, r, k):
(self.center_x, self.center_y,
self.radius, self.color) = (x, y, r, k)
########################################################
If we have such a structure to glue those four values into a single thing,
then our functions that deal with circles now only have to pass that one
thing around:
########################
def draw_circle(circle):
...
########################
This technique is how we avoid passing so many separate parameters around:
we group them together. The grouping shouldn't be random, so that's where
intelligence and asthetics comes in.
Best of wishes!
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