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A class diagram exemplifying the singleton pattern.. In object-oriented programming, the singleton pattern is a software design pattern that restricts the instantiation of a class to a singular instance.
This means that there is no way to change those parts of the object state, even though other parts of the object may be changeable (weakly immutable). If all fields are immutable, then the object is immutable. If the whole object cannot be extended by another class, the object is called strongly immutable. [4]
Object-oriented design patterns typically show relationships and interactions between classes or objects, without specifying the final application classes or objects that are involved. [ citation needed ] Patterns that imply mutable state may be unsuited for functional programming languages.
Python makes a distinction between lists and tuples. Lists are written as [1, 2, 3], are mutable, and cannot be used as the keys of dictionaries (dictionary keys must be immutable in Python). Tuples, written as (1, 2, 3), are immutable and thus can be used as keys of dictionaries, provided all of the tuple's elements are immutable.
The second notable difference is that the void type is special and can never be stored in a record type, i.e. in a struct or a class in C/C++. In contrast, the unit type can be stored in records in functional programming languages, i.e. it can appear as the type of a field; the above implementation of the unit type in C++ can also be stored.
Concrete classes have to explicitly declare they implement the immutable interface. This may not be possible if the concrete class "belongs to" third-party code, for instance, if it is contained within a library. The object is not really immutable and hence not suitable for use in data structures relying on immutability like hash maps.
Python sets are very much like mathematical sets, and support operations like set intersection and union. Python also features a frozenset class for immutable sets, see Collection types. Dictionaries (class dict) are mutable mappings tying keys and corresponding values. Python has special syntax to create dictionaries ({key: value})
Classes may inherit from other classes, so they are arranged in a hierarchy that represents "is-a-type-of" relationships. For example, class Employee might inherit from class Person. All the data and methods available to the parent class also appear in the child class with the same names.