implicitVars [Was: Re: Best Practices in Rev development]

[Joe Lewis Wilkins]

Finally!!!!

You're my hero.

Joe Wilkins

On Jul 1, 2007, at 10:11 AM, Francis Nugent Dixon wrote:

> Hi from Paris,
>
> Chipp,
>
> I am sure that we ALL have our own "flawed" programming
> practices. I have always been amazed by the different
> opinions of everybody, on a subject where the "correct"
> solution seems so obvious ............. to each of us ........... !
>
> I came from 1401 Autocoder, through Fortran, through
> Cobol, through years of 360 Assembler, through PL/1,
> through Basic, ignored C (couldn't understand how you
> use so many words to say so little !), through 12 years
> of Hypercard, and finally to Rev (two years .. and counting !).
>
> I define all my globals (GVxxx), and also define all my
> locals (LVxxx) as globals during development of a stack,
> and make them comments when the stack runs OK (but
> switch them back to globals, if I run any major mods).
>
> I never use the debug function. I go to bed with a problem
> on my mind, and the next day, I code the solution straight
> into the machine, and it works (it always amazes me !).
>
> Now I know that Maslow said "If all you have in your hand
> is a hammer, you tend to treat everything around you as a
> nail", and I respect your point of view on variables, but
> programming practices are in themselves "variable".
>
> After 40 years of programming, I think I could write a book
> called "Some programmers are from Mars, Others are from
> Venus" (and I don't know what planet I came from ......!)
>
> The same thing is true for "comments". Nobody (in his
> right mind) will ever read my scripts in any of my Rev
> stacks. In fact, nobody will ever see any of my Rev
> stacks (with the exception of "FamilyTree"). Yet, I spend
> many hours commenting my scripts, simply because I
> grew up in a commercial environment, and learned to
> hate the "fancy" programmers that never left a comment
> for others, and gave impossible names to their variables.
>
> I shudder when I remember a well-travelled student who
> wrote his first program, couldn't think of any sensible names
> for his variables, and so used the names of all the towns
> and cities in China. We loved that guy to bits when we had
> maintain his program for the following years .......!
>
> I can come back to any of MY OWN Hypercard and Rev
> stacks, years later, and within two minutes can master the
> twisted mind of the guy who wrote those scripts years before.
>
> Explicit Variables ...... Comments ........ I'm all for them !
>
> -Francis