Class == factory function considered harmful? (Re: Thoughts about Python)

[Paul Prescod]

Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de) wrote:

>...
> 
> Now, if you change the implementation so that Foo is
> no longer a class, code which subclasses Foo will break --
> there's no avoiding that. But code which only instantiates,
> using foo(), will keep working.

Okay, but is this ever a serious problem? Is changing classes into 
functions and vice versa actually a common enough problem to worry about?

  Paul Prescod