Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Are there practical reasons for designing a method-only class/object?

Post

Are there practical reasons for designing a method-only class/object?

+3
−1

Are there practical reasons for designing/implementing a method(s)-only class/object?

Follow-up background notes:

This question is for languages that are not exclusively Object-Oriented, for example, Python and Perl. So languages that can have classes/instances and top-level independent functions.

The event that started me thinking about this is that was reading some code that is a mixture of classes/object and independent functions. I wonder what things to evaluate when thinking about whether/is some of the independent functions should be grouped to classes/object.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

Sure, i guess... (2 comments)
Sure, i guess...
elgonzo‭ wrote about 3 years ago · edited about 3 years ago

Depends entirely how you would define "practical reason" and how narrow or broad you understand the term "class". Is the mere existence of method-only classes in a runtime or framework (such as System.Object in .NET/C#, or java.lang.object in Java) already "practical reasons" enough to answer your question? Does the term "class" in your question include abstract classes and/or static (uninstantiable) classes, or only instantiable/concrete classes?

Skipping 1 deleted comment.

CodeFarmer‭ wrote about 3 years ago · edited about 3 years ago

Those are good points. When I posted the question I was thinking of 'only instantiable/concrete classes' but you bring up some additional cases. The reason for the initial question is that I was reading through some code in a language that allows functions as well as classes/object and I go to wondering what design considerations would one think about in deciding whether to leave the functions as single functions or group some of them as methods in a method only class.