On 29/10/2012 15:20, andrea crotti wrote:
I have a philosofical doubt about immutability, that arised while doing the SCALA functional programming course.Now suppose I have a simple NumWrapper class, that very stupidly does: class NumWrapper(object): def __init__(self, number): self.number = number and we want to change its state incrementing the number, normally I would do this def increment(self): self.number += 1 But the immutability purists would instead suggest to do this: def increment(self): return NumWrapper(self.number + 1) Now on one hand I would love to use only immutable data in my code, but on the other hand I wonder if it makes so much sense in Python. My impression is that things get more clumsy in the immutable form, for example in the mutable form I would do simply this: number = NumWrapper(1) number.increment() while with immutability I have to do this instead: new_number = number.increment() But more importantly normally classes are way more complicated than my stupid example, so recreating a new object with the modified state might be quite complex. Any comments about this? What do you prefer and why?
I prefer practicality beats purity. -- Cheers. Mark Lawrence. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
