More about Singleton and static

Below is from 'http://my.opera.com/zomg/blog/2007/09/17/singleton-pattern-vs-static-classes'

Singleton also gives a reference/pointer to the class instance. You can then pass this reference as a parameter for some other function for example. If you were using static classes, the other function would have to use the class statically too and if you ever needed to change the behavior, you would need to rewrite parts of that function too instead of just having the first one pass a different class as the parameter.

There's also an another side to the reference thing. If you use the reference in your class and decide that you won't need a singleton anymore, but a normal class, you will just need to change the behavior of the class itself and perhaps replace the line which gets an instance of it to constructing a new one or such. If you were using a static class, you would have to rewrite a lot of the code to use the new reference to the class instead of the static class name. A singleton class should also work almost out of the box as a normal class too. If you had a static class and wanted to convert it to a normal one, you would have to rewrite many parts of it.


You can't extend static classes, but singletons you can. Except it doesn't work very well in PHP due to some issues with static method inheritance, but it's not the only language in the world and it can be done but slightly hackily.



So if we think about it with all this, why would you use static classes at all?
They have their uses too - For example for library code they can be nice, such as the static System.Math class in C#.