python - Is it bad practice to modify a reference inside a method, rather than returning values?

Question

Let's say I have:

Class Player():
    
    def makeAction():
        # modify state

Class State():
    
   def __init___(self):
      self.x = 'x'
      self.y = 'y'

Class GameEngine():
   
    def __init__(self):
        self.players = []
        self.state = State()
  
    def makeActions():
        for player in self.players:
            player.makeAction(self.state)

My issue is that the code for my game is already pretty large, and it seems like it would be easier to follow if it were more obvious exactly where the state gets updated. There are three things I can think of to change this: change the last line to something like

1. self.state = player.makeAction(self.state)
2. self.state = player.makeAction(copy(self.state))
3. self.state.x, self.state.y = player.makeAction(self.state.x, self.state.y)

Option 1 is superfluous but seems to make the code more clear, 2 just looks ugly. Option 3 seems the "cleanest" but may get hard to read if I'm passing in and retrieving lots of attributes. I could also keep it as is.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65622791/is-it-bad-practice-to-modify-a-reference-inside-a-method-rather-than-returning

Answer 1

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