Hi from Paris, Chipp,
I am sure that we ALL have our own "flawed" programming practices. I have always been amazed by the different opinions of everybody, on a subject where the "correct" solution seems so obvious ............. to each of us ........... ! I came from 1401 Autocoder, through Fortran, through Cobol, through years of 360 Assembler, through PL/1, through Basic, ignored C (couldn't understand how you use so many words to say so little !), through 12 years of Hypercard, and finally to Rev (two years .. and counting !). I define all my globals (GVxxx), and also define all my locals (LVxxx) as globals during development of a stack, and make them comments when the stack runs OK (but switch them back to globals, if I run any major mods). I never use the debug function. I go to bed with a problem on my mind, and the next day, I code the solution straight into the machine, and it works (it always amazes me !). Now I know that Maslow said "If all you have in your hand is a hammer, you tend to treat everything around you as a nail", and I respect your point of view on variables, but programming practices are in themselves "variable". After 40 years of programming, I think I could write a book called "Some programmers are from Mars, Others are from Venus" (and I don't know what planet I came from ......!) The same thing is true for "comments". Nobody (in his right mind) will ever read my scripts in any of my Rev stacks. In fact, nobody will ever see any of my Rev stacks (with the exception of "FamilyTree"). Yet, I spend many hours commenting my scripts, simply because I grew up in a commercial environment, and learned to hate the "fancy" programmers that never left a comment for others, and gave impossible names to their variables. I shudder when I remember a well-travelled student who wrote his first program, couldn't think of any sensible names for his variables, and so used the names of all the towns and cities in China. We loved that guy to bits when we had maintain his program for the following years .......! I can come back to any of MY OWN Hypercard and Rev stacks, years later, and within two minutes can master the twisted mind of the guy who wrote those scripts years before. Explicit Variables ...... Comments ........ I'm all for them ! -Francis _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
