writing a class or a function

[Skaperen]

There are no cases where classes are required.

Python is a great example, being written in C, which itself doesn't support classes. It then follows, that anything in python is also possible in C, and that anything you could accomplish with a class, you could also accomplish without one.

So no, there are no cases where a class is essential over a function.

but, or course, doing this could mak you Python code as ugly as the frequent mangled messes that often happen with C.

That said, they were created for a reason, and that reason is state management. If you have state you're keeping track of, classes help encapsulate that state, as well as grouping related functions together to strongly indicate to other readers that the functions are, in fact, related to one another.

state can be encapsulated many ways. a class is not needed just for that. but when using a class, that code can gain benefits like duplication of that state.

is the "grouping related functions together" aspect being done by the functions being methods and being coded as attributes of the class so that the reader of the code sees the common usage of the class name? can't longer names do that, too, such as scaled_sin() and scaled_sqrt()

i'm just trying to pin down what all a class brings to the table.