Re: Who writes crap like this?

Post #47,998 by mmoffitt 8/3/02 11:54:28 PM Reply	Re: Who writes crap like this? Engineers. Not s/w engineers, but EE's and Mech E's and folks like that who have discovered PC's and VB, or who have chosen Intellution/Wonderware/Rockwell for their HMI needs. I've never seen an app written by an engineer that didn't make excessive use of "globals". I hate cleaning this shit up, but, as you say, it's a living and there is a TON of this kind of shit to clean up. bcnu, Mikem
Post #48,013 by deSitter 8/4/02 2:18:24 AM Reply	Re: Who writes crap like this? Often it is better to use globals when doing numerical calculations in a practical sense. In older days one had FORTRAN with its static store running on machines with restricted memory. A program might have to be chopped into a lot of pieces and you needed a certain way to have the same data available. FORTRAN is a very brute force language and engineers are out to solve specific problems. I know what you mean, but it's not really fair. -drl
Post #48,138 by boxley 8/5/02 10:57:15 AM Reply	Globals, write once run everywhere, whats wrong with that? Trouble with programmers is that they define on the fly with no sensual objective of what huge bucket of crap they are not documenting. Engineers write small modular pieces and generally understand what machine code is and which way the solder drips. Pogrommers are rapid typists writing the great american novel and are surprised when the 2 record database they tested on doesnt behave the way the 200 kajillion records in the production environment. All present company excepted of course and a couple of my buds. thanx, bill ."Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, I had to subsist on food and water for several weeks." W.C. Fields
Post #48,271 by static 8/5/02 9:26:55 PM Reply	There globals and there are Globals. That is, there globals that stick around for the life of the application and then there are "global" variables within a module with a short lifespan. CGI and web script programming is like that: it's easy to use "global" variables in PHP, but they die when the page is finished. So they only have a short lifespan, unlike global variables in more traditional languages (like C). PHP's equivalent is called session variables, but you have to make a special call to convert a global variable into a session variable. This encourages some discipline. Despite it's other flaws, Visual BASIC was like this. Truly global variables required additional declarations, as did mere module-wide variables. Unfortunately, there was a compile-time option to disable this requirement. Myself, I dislike long-lived, volitale global variables. If I find myself about to use them, I tend to stop and try to fix whatever's broken to require them. Not always possible, note, but I try. Wade. "Ah. One of the difficult questions."

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