[Tutor] Communication between classes

[Greg Perry]

That makes sense, thank you for the detailed explanation Andrei.  For this simple project I am working on, it looks like the most direct route would be to use functions and only develop classes for the portions of the program that can be reused.

Is it safe to say that classes are only useful for instances where reuse is a key consideration?  From my very limited perspective, it seems that classes are in most cases overkill for simple tasks (such as reading the command line then calculating a hash/checksum to verify integrity).

Thanks again for your very descriptive answer.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrei

Hi Greg,
>
>Greg Perry wrote:
> I am still in the process of learning OOP concepts and 
> > reasons why classes should be used instead of functions etc.
> 
> One thing that is not apparent to me is the best way for 
> > classes to communicate with each other.  For example,
>
>Good question. Unfortunately there's no general rule that you can apply 
>and end up with an undisputably perfect solution.
>
>Classes should communicate on a need-to-know basis. Take for example a 
>RSS feed reader application. You may have a class representing a feed 
>and a class representing a post. The feed will know what posts it 
>contains, but the post probably won't know what feed it comes from. The 
>interface would display a list of feeds (without knowing their 
>contents), a list of posts within a feed (this needs to know both feed 
>and feed contents) and the contents of a single post (knows only about 
>an individual post).
>
> > I have created an Args class that sets a variety of internal
> > variables (__filename, __outputdir etc) by parsing the argv
>
>Be careful with classes that simply act as a container for what are in 
>fact global variables. A class should do one thing only (of course what 
>you accept as 'one thing' is open for debate) and encapsulate all that's 
>necessary for that particular thing. Make sure you're not 
>overcomplicating your solution by making classes where they're not 
>really necessary.
>
> > array from th command line.  What would be the preferred
> > mechanism for returning or passing along those variables
>
>In some cases only some parts of the information contained in class A 
>are relevant to class B - you should pass only that particular 
>information, e.g. in the constructor or by setting a property of B. In 
>your example, if you have a Reader class that is interested in the 
>filename, you would not pass the whole Args object to it - only the 
>filename, like this:
>
>     myreader = Reader(Args.FileName)
>
> > to another class?  Maybe by a function method that returns
> > all of those variables?
>
>Use properties if you need getter/setter methods or simple attributes 
>otherwise. In your case, I would not make __filename etc. 'private' 
>(that's what the double underscore suggests), then write a getter method 
>for it - just call it FileName and be done with it. Python idiom here is 
>more flexible than other languages.
>
>-- 
>Yours,
>
>Andrei
>
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