Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Joshua Cranmer, post: 3690895"] comp.theory is probably a good place (I am not a denizen of said newsgroup, so I can't say for sure). A minor point, but factories are probably more future-proof. If you decide that a class would be, in the future, better designed as a light hierarchy based on some of the inputs via a factory method, you can make that change without breaking compatibility. If you have a constructor, you're stuck with it. This point, though, does need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Factories are also flexible in the creation of objects. Suppose you decide at some point that you need (for performance reasons) to have interned representations of objects. A constructor has to create a new object, but a factory can choose to reuse an existing item. Those two are the first reasons that come to my mind; there are other reasons, though (probably). [/QUOTE]