RE: [Rails-devel] The Player Class

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

> Erik Vos wrote:
> > I'm from a school of thought that classes should be self-managing,
> > which is why I tend to include static arrays and methods to manage
> > the instances of a class inside that class, as I have done 
> in Player. 
> 
> It's not exactly clear to me what you mean by self-managing.

A class that keeps a list of its own instances,
and provides methods to find these instances.
In some cases it might also instantiate them.
 
> Part of my coding philosophy is that, when taking any action 
> that needs
> to be cleaned up afterward (opening a file, allocating heap 
> memory, etc.),
> that action should be represented by a class object with a 
> destructor that
> cleans it up when it goes out of scope.  That way you can't forget it.

Cleanup is automatic in Java, if you remember not to keep
references to no-longer-needed objects.

> But if you mean you want to have a class keep a list of all 
> objects of that
> class, that's easy enough to do without static arrays.  

<snip>

Nice, but what is the advantage above a static array?
Looks a lot easier to me.

I'm getting the impression that 'static' is synonymous to
'not done' here....

Erik.