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Question


I'm currently working a on an assignment for school. The assignment is to create a puzzle/calculator program in which you learn how to work with different datastructures (such as Stacks). We have generate infix math strings suchs as "1 + 2 * 3 - 4" and then turn them in to postfix math strings such as "1 2 + 3 * 4 -".
In my book the author creates a special class for converting the infix notation to postfix. I was planning on using this but whilst I was about to implement it I was wondering if the following is what you would call "high coupling". I have read something about this (nothing that is taught in the book or anything) and was wondering about the aspect (since I still have to grasp it).

Problem


I have created a PuzzleGenerator class which generates the infix notation of the puzzle (or math string, whatever you want to call it) when it's instantiated. I was going to make a method getAnswer() in which I would instantiate the InToPost class (the class from the book) to convert the infix to postfox notation and then calculate the answer. But whilst doing this I thought: "Is using the InToPost class inside this method a form a high coupling, and would it be better to place this in a different method?" (such as a "convertPostfixToInfix" method, inside the PuzzleGenerator class)

Thanks in advance.

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No, it would not be high coupling -- no more than to use any library class within another class.

It is coupling, of course, because it's a dependency. High coupling occurs when there are too many direct dependencies between classes and you lose the ability to recycle your code. For example, if you have a LogWriter class which has only one method: Log( String ), you may use a specific class for outputting a log, such as a file writing class.

The above would be high coupling because you can't reuse the LogWriter class in other output modes. The job of the LogWriter class is to create log line and output them, not specifically log to the file system.

In that case it would be better to inject the dependency in the constructor, by passing it: you would have a LogWriter( OutputStream ) constructor which stores and reuses the stream to output the log.

Another possible way is to read a configuration file and compose the class from it using reflection.

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  • Thanks, that actually makes sense when you put it like that. (I did decide to split it up in different methods because getAnswer should just be getAnswer and not calculateAnswer ;))
    – Bono
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 13:44
  • Of course, reading from a configuration file is still coupling, it's coupled to the configuration system. If you think that's not a problem, you haven't had to work with or write tests with code buried deep in "reusable" libraries that requires specific entries to be in specific sections of the application configuration at runtime. It's more or less OK with something like log4j because the entire "framework" is meant to be initialized once, at application startup. God help you if some "clever" developer writes an email library that always takes the "from" header from appsettings.
    – Aaronaught
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 21:18
  • @Aaronaught you are confusing coupling and high coupling. Log4j might or might not have a desirable design as a library, but you can certainly use it without a configuration file if you need to: stackoverflow.com/questions/8965946/…
    – Sklivvz
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 21:24
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    I'm not confusing anything. There's no such thing as "high coupling" anyway - coupling is a quantity, it's afferent and efferent dependencies, and the bar for "high" is as subjective as the bar you might set for something like cyclomatic complexity or code coverage. I was simply pointing out that the configuration system is still a dependency, just an indirect one, and listed log4j as one of the examples of where the indirection isn't really a problem.
    – Aaronaught
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 21:43

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