What do you call a class not intended to be instantiated

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:41:46 +1000, James Mills wrote:

> On 22 Sep 2008 09:07:43 GMT, Steven D'Aprano
>> But that's precisely what I want to avoid: I don't want the objects to
>>  share *any* state, not even their class. I'm not trying for a Borg or
>>  Singleton: the user can call the factory as many times as they want,
>>  but the objects returned shouldn't share any state. I don't know if
>>  what I want has a name. Judging from people's reactions, I'd say
>>  probably not.
> 
> Snce when are "users" ever involved
> in programming problems or programming languages ?

What an astounding question.

Consider a class. There are the programmers who write the class, and 
there are the programmers (possibly the same people, but not necessarily) 
who use the class. The second set of people, the programmers who use the 
class, are *users* of the class. What else would they be?



-- 
Steven