Best Practices in Rev development

[Ken Ray]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:21:17 -0700, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Devin Asay wrote:
>>> Declare your local variables and enable the "variable checking by  
>>> default"
>>> option.
>>> It will help prevent typos and cut down your debugging time.
>> 
>> Right. On this one I have to weigh the gain of catching typos 
>> against  the pain of giving beginning students yet One More Thing to 
>> remember  while they're struggling to get their heads around the 
>> whole idea of  variables.
> 
> These days I find myself on the fence again on this one.
> 
> While I'm attracted to it in principle, because variable declarations 
> are optional I find myself enjoying turning that off while designing 
> new code, since it's hard to know in advance what vars I'll be using 
> and they tend to change as I refine the code.
> 
> The downside to this is that if I later turn on explicitVars I need 
> to go back and add all those declarations; in the heat of meeting 
> deadlines, I'll admit I rarely do.
> 
> So given the freedom of not using explicitVars while fleshing out 
> algorithms, is it really a valuable thing and I'm just lazy?

Actually, I have a stack I made that allows you to develop without 
local declarations and then after the fact run this utility and it will 
add the declarations for you. :-)

Best of both worlds...

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/