Don't understand the meaning of "local"

Alex Tweedly alex at tweedly.net
Fri Dec 23 19:21:32 EST 2005


Jim Ault wrote:

>On 12/23/05 12:55 PM, "Jim Hurley" <jhurley at infostations.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>The persistence of local SCRIPT variables that Chipp's earlier reply
>>clears up for me is handlers calling themselves (in x millisec or
>>whatever) in  order to achieve asynchronous behavior ( i.e. not
>>monopolizing CPU  time and allowing other uses of the  CPU to seek
>>in.)
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, and since there are two types of LOCAL variables, one could adopt the
>naming convention:
>
>g = global, persistent and available to any handler in any script container.
>s = script local, persistent but only available for handlers in that script
>container
>t = temporary or handler local
>p= passed parameter, same as 't'.  Important: this is a new variable
>containing a copy of the original contents.  Any changes you make to a 'p'
>variable will not change the original.  To do that, you need to 'return
>pWhatever' and put it into the original variable.
>  
>
Or you can pass the parameter by reference; in that case, there is not a 
separate, new variable - and any changes made within the handler are 
made to the actual variable. You do this by prepending an "@" to the 
parameter name, as in


> on myhandler @pByReference
>    ...
>    add 1 to pByReference
>    ...
> end myhandler


and the effect is to increment the variable passed to the handler.

I have always thought that this would warrant a separate naming 
convention (e.g. 'r' for parameter by reference, instead of 'p' for 
parameter) - though in fact I haven't used it often enough to feel that 
was important for me.


-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net

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