Global Madness

[Howard Bornstein]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 21:16:16 -0800, Dan Shafer <revdan at danshafer.com> wrote:
> Howard....
> 
> I spent a good bit of time testing this today, and I'm about as
> bewildered as you on some levels. That may or may not be comforting.
> LOL

> 3. However -- and this is where it gets really mysterious to me -- it
> NEVER fails to pass the correct value of the global to other handlers
> in the same script, no matter whether I've "initialized" it. So I was
> NOT able to reproduce that particular aspect of the behavior you
> mentioned.

Hi Dan,

Thank you (and John and Chipp) so much for verifying this. As a
result, I've just cancelled my appointment with my brain-care
specialist.

I agree that if the variables always get passed, then this is more of
a curiosity than a real problem. I had solved this issue in my script
by initializing these globals with dummy values and things then worked
fine.

I just went back to my scripts and commented out the initializing
code, and you know what...it's still working(!) I hope I didn't create
a tempest in a teapot here. But initially this didn't work in my
script. The reason it threw me so much is that I've *never* had
problems with globals and I probably use them more than many on this
list because my situation innoculates me from many of the programming
issues with globals.

And I had been using other globals in my program with no problem.
However, John Vokey noted that he's seen this problem before and that
its appearance is inconsistent. His descriptions of globals sometimes
working and sometimes not is consistent with the testing I did.
Unfortunately, I don't currently have a reproducible recipe of globals
not passing their values to other handlers--something I would
definitely consider bugzillable.

I've often used globals in the past as a debugging tool, since they
retain their values after a handler has ended. It's a simple matter
(or it used to be) to type their names in the message box to see if
they have the values I expect them too.

This little exercise has surprised me with this behavior and it's
really mind-boggling to find that this exists as far back as V2.2.1.

I'll continue testing this with my app and I appreciate those who took
the time to verify this with me. If this does continue to happen
intermittently, its the kind of bug that can really drive you nuts!

-- 
Regards,

Howard Bornstein
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