[program-l] Python: Please Help Me Think Out Loud About When To Make Classes And When Not To Make Them

  • From: "Homme, James" <james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:25:38 +0000

Hi,
I think that my chess project is one in which it's OK to make the class that 
uses the cmd class, but is also OK to import a file that has chess related 
functions, but is not a class. If I'm wrong, please tell me. Here's how I view 
the project in my mind right now, and where it's going. But the big question in 
my mind is this. What makes you either decide to make classes or not make them?

I now have a file that I'm going to change so that it returns the results of 
the functions it calls from my chess board module. In order to make the 
functions in my command file see the ones I'm making in the chess board file, I 
put an import statement at the top. When I did this, my functions could call 
the ones in my chess board file.

I'm going to have functions like new game. I think that this makes it so that I 
don't need to instantiate a chess board class. I say this because of the way 
this whole thing is constructed. Every time
I type a command, it gets ready to receive a new one.  I'm keeping the help 
functions in my commands file, though. I'm not going to migrate them over, or 
put functions in the chess board file that return help text. I may have to 
change my mind, but this is how I see it working right now.

The only thing my commands file will do is start and run the command loop.

I'm hoping that once I learn how to make GUI programs, I can simply swap out my 
command line processing file and make the GUI file just use the functions in 
the chess board file. So, in stead of a command loop, it would make some sort 
of event loop or whatever that GUI thing is called that waits for you to click 
stuff and choose stuff.

So theoretically, I can put out a command line version of my program, and a GUI 
version of it.

But what concerns me is the question of whether I'm constructing it this way 
because I come from a procedural programming back ground and subconsciously 
want to avoid making classes, or whether this is the best way to construct the 
project.

It seems like a nice way to divide things up, though, so that it helps me think 
of each file having a set of functions. For example, maybe there would be a 
third file that does nothing but save and load game data from disk, assuming 
that I want to build in the capability to save and load games in progress, and 
I see no reason I wouldn't want to do that. Here again, though, I'm thinking 
that the chess board file would import the one that loads and saves the data. 
And I'm thinking that the file that does that may not need to contain a class 
that does this. I'm not that far in my thinking though.

Thanks for listening.

Jim

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