OT Re: Newbie... Strict Compilation mode

[Richmond Mathewson]

God may forgive you, but the rest of us will . . .

love you and cherish you for initiating a useful and
stimulating discussion!

And, the moral of the story is: you can be bl**dy-minded like me,
or you can be bl**dy-minded like somebody else, or (what a luxury)
you can be bl**dy-minded in you own way.

To my mind, the 'tolerance' of Runtime Revolution is what makes it
so much more accessible than most other programming environments.

Stephen Cox wrote:
> Well..  God.. Sorry all for starting this. :)
>
> Use what you want. I'll keep it on cause I'm used to that type of
> environment. Used to declaring variables. And it's in my head.
>
>
>
> On 5/10/09 1:09 AM, "Joe Lewis Wilkins" <pepetoo at cox.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> Following this thread has pushed another one of my buttons and I
>> cannot resist getting on my soap-box and inserting my two-bits.
>>
>> We have "all" become accustomed to protecting ourselves from
>> ourselves. To the point where some of us pass laws requiring that
>> everyone protect themselves. I'm talking about INSURANCE. The best
>> "insurance" against having anything happen is an alert and active
>> mind.  Insurance merely puts us to sleep; allowing us to be less than
>> vigilant and knowledgeable within all aspects of our lives. Not
>> declaring vars merely promotes sloppiness and, eventually, stupidity.
>> The President is going to spend enormous sums of money promoting
>> Health Insurance, when the best insurance is almost free; preventive
>> medicine which we have neglected for decades. We just need to be
>> diligent about all things. Education, eduction, education!!!!!!!!
>>
>> Joe Wilkins
>>
>>   On May 9, 2009, at 8:47 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Jacque-
>>>
>>> Saturday, May 9, 2009, 6:01:53 PM, you wrote:
>>>
>>> Ah... I *knew* this would push Jacque's buttons... <g>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> 1. The main strength of xtalk is that you do not have to declare or
>>>> type
>>>> variables. Sticking them up there at the top of every handler removes
>>>> one of the main advantages of using Rev in the first place.
>>>>         
>>> I seriously take issue with that being "the main strength" of xtalk.
>>>
>>>       
>>>> 5. And finally, what's wrong with being lazy? :) The smart programmer
>>>> finds the easiest way to do things. That's what Rev is all about.
>>>>         
>>> Laziness is one of the big reasons I *do* declare my variables. If the
>>> compiler is smart enough to catch all kinds of errors for me, why
>>> should I go through all the debugging work at runtime? I believe in
>>> letting the computer do the hard work for me, otherwise I might as
>>> well just be coding the cpu's opcodes by hand.
>>>
>>>       
>>>> None of these things is outweighed for me by the fact that
>>>> explicitVars
>>>> might catch a few typos. The engine catches most of those anyway and
>>>> throws an error.
>>>>         
>>>> Back to today's response:
>>>>         
>>>> The debugger pinpoints the exact source of the misspelling if it
>>>> happens; how hard is that? I'm a pretty good typist though, so I
>>>> don't
>>>> get caught out too often. I suppose if you are really as bad a
>>>> typist as
>>>> your theoretical example, then yes, you'd want some help. ;)
>>>>         
>>> <puts on a SNL snarl>
>>> ...Jacque, you ignorant slut...
>>> <returns to reality>
>>> You're missing the point. The purpose of explicitVars is to catch
>>> things that slip by the compiler otherwise. If it's just a simple
>>> misspelling of a keyword the compiler will catch it anyway, as you
>>> pointed out. But explicitVars will let you know if you've mistyped a
>>> variable name when the "friendly" compiler would helpfully generate a
>>> new variable instead of using the one you intended. And it will help
>>> when your fingers forget to place a space after "the" and instead of
>>> the variableNames ending up in a variable you end up with empty.
>>>
>>>       
>>>> I once took over a project from someone who used explicit
>>>> variables. I
>>>> stripped out all the declarations so I could read the scripts
>>>> comfortably. The stack size was cut in half (!). No lie. There were
>>>> all
>>>> kinds of handlers in there with something like 8 lines of
>>>> declarations
>>>> and three lines of actual script. Waste of time and space.
>>>>         
>>> I recognize hyperbole when I see it, but nonetheless I don't think you
>>> can have 8 lines of declarations and three lines of actual script (and
>>> of course someone will post some code that proves me wrong). If you
>>> come across a handler like this then you have at least five lines of
>>> declarations that are not being used. And then you're absolutely right
>>> to strip them out <g>.
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> -Mark Wieder
>>> mwieder at ahsoftware.net
>>>       
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