I've been musing on #OOP style. I have a question for the more experienced programmers out there.
How do you decide when a class's method doesn't actually need to be a method, but instead could just be a regular function?
I'm not talking about functions that need to be shared between classes. I'm talking about intentionally moving a method outside of a class, even though it will only ever be used by that class.
For example, if I've got a parser-related function that is only needed by the parser, I will normally just put it in the parser class as a method. It keeps things neat, I can make it private and lock down the class. But I've never before stopped to think whether this is the correct thing to do every time.
After all, #Pascal (my language of choice) has the concept of units. I could just have some functions just as functions, and only have methods for things that directly need to update the class's properties.
It would make things easier for testing, too. I wouldn't need to create an instance of a class just to test a specific function works as intended.
But I don't know if it's the "right" way to do things in OO, or #ObjectPascal for that matter.
