Confused about class relationships

[bieffe62 at gmail.com]

On 27 Nov, 06:20, John O'Hagan <resea... at johnohagan.com> wrote:
> Apologies if this is a D.Q., I'm still learning to use classes, and this
> little problem has proved too specific to find in the tutorials.
>
> I have two classes with a relationship that I find confusing.
>
> One is called Engine, and it has a method (bar_builder) which generates
> instances of the other class, called Bar (not as in Foo but as in bar of
> music; inherits from list).
>
> Also, Bar takes the generating instance of Engine as an argument to its
> __init__ method:
>
> class Bar(list):
>
>         def __init__(self, a_bar, args, engine):
>                 list.__init__ (self, a_bar)
>                 self[:] = a_bar        
>                 self.args = args
>                 self.engine = engine
>                 #more instance attributes...
>
>         #methods...
>
> class Engine:
>
>         def __init__(self, args):
>                 self.args = args                        
>                 #more instance attributes...
>
>         def bar_builder(self):
>                 #body of method generates lists...
>                 yield Bar([generated_list], args, self)
>
>         #more methods...
>
> #(other stuff...)
>
> def main(args):
>
>             engine = Engine(args)
>             bars = engine.bar_builder()
>             for a_bar in bars:
>                 #play the music!...
>
> While this works (to my surprise!) and solves the problem which motivated it
> (i.e. Engine instances need to pass some attributes to Bar instances ), it
> seems too convoluted. Should one class inherit the other? If so, which way
> around? Or is it fine as is?
>
> I'm hoping this is a common trap I've fallen into; I just haven't been able to
> get my head around it. (I'm a musician...)
>
> John O'Hagan


if you need the engine to generate a (potentially) infinite sequence
of bars, this approach seems the most linear
you could do ...
Inheritance is for classes which share attribute/methods, which is not
the case ...

then, there are always many way to to the same thing, and sometime
they are equivalent but for the
programmer taste ...

Ciao
------
FB