Question

I have to implement a set of 60 functions, according to the predefined signatures. They must be global functions, and not some class’s member functions. When I implement them, I use a set of nicely done classes provided by 3rd party.

My implementation of most functions is quite short, about 5-10 lines, and deals mostly with different accesses to that 3rd party classes. For some more complicated functions I created a couple of new classes that deal with all the complicated stuff, and I use them in the functions too. All the state information is stored in the static members of my and 3rd party’s classes, so I don’t have to create global variables.

Question: Would it be better if I implement one big class with 60 member functions, and do all the implementation (that is now in the global functions) there? And each of the functions that I have to write will just call to the corresponding member function in the class.

Answer 1

All the state information is stored in the static members of my and 3rd party’s classes, so I don’t have to create global variables.

That is the keypoint. No, they should definitely not be put into classes. Classes are made to be used for creating objects. In your situation, you would use them just as a scope, for the data and functions. But this is what namespaces already solve better:

namespace stuff {     ... 60 functions ...     namespace baz {         ... if you want, you can have nested namespaces, to ...         ... categorize the functions ...     }      namespace data {         ... you can put data into an extra namespace if you want ...     } } 

Creating classes that consist purely only of static members is a bad idea.