newbie: self.member syntax seems /really/ annoying

[Ryan Ginstrom]

> On Behalf Of madzientist
> As a newbie to Python (and OOP), I would love to hear what 
> people think of Steven's suggestion below. Is there a reason 
> why classes would be useful for the OP's question ? If you 
> can point me to a brief online tutorial addressing this, I 
> would happily go there to read it too :)

In general, you should use classes when you need to maintain state. The
classic example is a BankAccount class, each instance of which maintains a
"balance" state.

When you don't need to maintain state, module-level functions are fine. In
fact, for testability/reliability, they're preferred, because when a method
twiddles some internal state, it's much harder to test. It's valuable to
have a function that always gives output x for input y, with no side
effects. That (to me) is the appeal of the functional programming style.

Regards,
Ryan Ginstrom