I find the history, and the concept itself worthwhile enough to bother saving... so here's the text, followed by further discussion... ---- ---- When you need a class that can only ever have one instance, Singletons are often the simplest way to implement them. They reduce needless dependencies. They localize access to unique things. They can be abused, but so can most patterns. -- EricHodges ''I'm experimenting with refactoring a discussion using hyper text, the original page for this dicussion is SingletonsAreGood'' -- JonGrover WhatIsaSingleton? JohnFletcher Since I not-so-humbly disagreed with using hypertext, I turned SingletonPattern into DocumentMode by glomming together what Jon did and removing the signatures. Jon did some really useful work by neatly categorizing everything, which I think everyone should now take a moment to appreciate. Thank you, Jon, for cleaning up this place. -- SunirShah ---- '''Discussion:''' ''HowAreSingletonsDifferentFromGlobalVariables?'' The true worth of singletons is: * SingletonsProvideServiceAccess * SingletonsMakeItEasyToComposeaProgramFromComponents without creating component interdependencies. * SingletonsProvideEasyTestAndDeploymentEnvironments NotEverythingCanOrShouldBeaSingleton. ---- See also SingletonPattern, SingletonsAreEvil ---- ---- I find this a very interesting concept, although I also can see the cause for complaint. On one hand, as SunirShah pointed out, it is a very neat way to organize the information; you get a nice quick overview of the discussion (somewhat getting around the issue of wiki pages eventually demonstrating the opposite point from their titles'. On the other hand, it's really a pain to read the whole 'logical page', because of the splitting. This fits more into a wishlist/ideas-for-future-wiki's, but what if the text of those links could be embedded right on the page, but collapsable (by default even?)? Just a though, perhaps somebody can continue on this train of thought... --WilliamUnderwood