classes vs dicts

[Donn Cave]

In article <7id65haegq.fsf at enark.csis.hku.hk>,
 Isaac To <kkto at csis.hku.hk> wrote:

> >>>>> "Charlie" == Charlie  <charlvj at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
>     Charlie> Greetings, I am pretty new to Python and like it very much, but
>     Charlie> there is one thing I can't figure out and I couldn't really
>     Charlie> find anything in the docs that addresses this.
> 
>     Charlie> Say I want to write an address book program, what is the best
>     Charlie> way to define a person (and the like): create a class (as I
>     Charlie> would do in Java) or use a dictionary?  I guess using
>     Charlie> dictionaries is fastest and easiest, but is this recommended?
> 
> I read the answers already in the list, which are rather unidirectional: all
> advocate for classes.  But I'm unconvinced.  I still believe that there is
> no clear-cut winner, and what you should do dopend on how you view the
> person.
> 
> If you want to associate actions to the person, say associate two persons in
> some way; and you want to create various types of persons (subclass it) such
> that each of them have different behaviour, then the extra complexity added
> by representing the person as a class will definitely pay off.
> 
> But, on the other hand, if your application simply treat the person as some
> data, turning every access of the person into a getter or a setter or even a
> combination will only make code more clumsy and harder to write.

I agree - for plain data, use a plain data structure.  One advantage,
beside just the obviousness of it all, is that your data structure will
support data structure operations, like iteration for example.

   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu