Well, I'm certainly not going to presume to criticise your method,
but in the spirit of "you show me yours, I'll show you mine", what I
tend to do is to have a stack in my apps which is put 'in use' at
startup, and which has various getters and setters. The actual data
it returns could be in cps, script locals, text files, databases or
somewhere on t'internet, the calling handlers don't have to know. So:
answer gcOK() in a handler calls the gcOK() function in my library
stack which might be
function gcOK
return "OK?" -- literal
end gcOK
or
function cgOK
return the okMessage of me -- cp
end gcOK
or
function gcOK
return sOkMessage -- script local
end gcOK
or
function gcOK
get URL (http://www.google.com/search?q=OK";
--parse html and find what you need
return whatYouFound
end gcOK
etc.
This approach proved very handy indeed recently, when the data
(retrieved from the web) for one of my apps changed format, but all I
had to do was re-write a couple of getter functions, the job was
done, and I felt quite smug.
Script locals are quite a neat way of achieving data-hiding when used
this way.
Best,
Mark
On 2 Apr 2007, at 23:53, Graham Samuel wrote:
Forgive me if this conversation has ended, but my internet
connection has been in meltdown... just got back on line.
I most frequently use globals because there aren't global
constants. I use them very largely for strings containing stuff
like error messages or even very simple strings like "OK", so that
I can refer to these indirectly in scripts, thus allowing me to
switch (human) languages by redefining the globals in just one
script of the program. I guess I could have used custom property
sets with exactly the same effect, and with the advantage that I
wouldn't have to initialise them during the startup of my app, but
like many others I didn't understand these when I started, and I
tend to re-use stuff I wrote before. I guess there isn't much
difference between writing
answer gcOK -- 'gcOK' is a global with a string in it.
and
answer (the gcOK of stack "allTheConstantStrings") -- 'the gcOK'
is a property of some object.
but the second statement seems to have more characters in it, since
it involves referring to the object in which the property is
stored. If there are a lot of such references, my scripts are going
to get longer.
I also use globals when I have a quantity which needs to be used in
different scripts in different stacks, i.e globally: a very obvious
point, but I really don't see what is wrong with that. I do accept
that I have to be disciplined about changing their values. I do use
properties (I tend to use these for global status stuff like 'the
soundOn of this stack'), parameter-passing and message-passing
extensively, but to me globals feel right for quite a lot of things.
I shall now wait for someone to tell me why this is a really wrong-
headed approach. I'm always willing to learn - really.
Graham
----------------------------------------
Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK and France
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