Following this thread has pushed another one of my buttons and I
cannot resist getting on my soap-box and inserting my two-bits.
We have "all" become accustomed to protecting ourselves from
ourselves. To the point where some of us pass laws requiring that
everyone protect themselves. I'm talking about INSURANCE. The best
"insurance" against having anything happen is an alert and active
mind. Insurance merely puts us to sleep; allowing us to be less than
vigilant and knowledgeable within all aspects of our lives. Not
declaring vars merely promotes sloppiness and, eventually, stupidity.
The President is going to spend enormous sums of money promoting
Health Insurance, when the best insurance is almost free; preventive
medicine which we have neglected for decades. We just need to be
diligent about all things. Education, eduction, education!!!!!!!!
Joe Wilkins
On May 9, 2009, at 8:47 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:
Jacque-
Saturday, May 9, 2009, 6:01:53 PM, you wrote:
Ah... I *knew* this would push Jacque's buttons... <g>
1. The main strength of xtalk is that you do not have to declare or
type
variables. Sticking them up there at the top of every handler removes
one of the main advantages of using Rev in the first place.
I seriously take issue with that being "the main strength" of xtalk.
5. And finally, what's wrong with being lazy? :) The smart programmer
finds the easiest way to do things. That's what Rev is all about.
Laziness is one of the big reasons I *do* declare my variables. If the
compiler is smart enough to catch all kinds of errors for me, why
should I go through all the debugging work at runtime? I believe in
letting the computer do the hard work for me, otherwise I might as
well just be coding the cpu's opcodes by hand.
None of these things is outweighed for me by the fact that
explicitVars
might catch a few typos. The engine catches most of those anyway and
throws an error.
Back to today's response:
The debugger pinpoints the exact source of the misspelling if it
happens; how hard is that? I'm a pretty good typist though, so I
don't
get caught out too often. I suppose if you are really as bad a
typist as
your theoretical example, then yes, you'd want some help. ;)
<puts on a SNL snarl>
...Jacque, you ignorant slut...
<returns to reality>
You're missing the point. The purpose of explicitVars is to catch
things that slip by the compiler otherwise. If it's just a simple
misspelling of a keyword the compiler will catch it anyway, as you
pointed out. But explicitVars will let you know if you've mistyped a
variable name when the "friendly" compiler would helpfully generate a
new variable instead of using the one you intended. And it will help
when your fingers forget to place a space after "the" and instead of
the variableNames ending up in a variable you end up with empty.
I once took over a project from someone who used explicit
variables. I
stripped out all the declarations so I could read the scripts
comfortably. The stack size was cut in half (!). No lie. There were
all
kinds of handlers in there with something like 8 lines of
declarations
and three lines of actual script. Waste of time and space.
I recognize hyperbole when I see it, but nonetheless I don't think you
can have 8 lines of declarations and three lines of actual script (and
of course someone will post some code that proves me wrong). If you
come across a handler like this then you have at least five lines of
declarations that are not being used. And then you're absolutely right
to strip them out <g>.
--
-Mark Wieder
[email protected]
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