Mark Wieder wrote:
On 09/02/2015 05:43 AM, Kay C Lan wrote:
You don't think you're being a bit over dramatic?
Who? Me? lol.
Seriously, though... here's a case in point.
When I first released PowerDebug it was wide open as far a catching any
problems. Soon users started reporting that they were seeing weird
system errors with PowerDebug in the system but were not seeing them
without it. And naturally they would blame PowerDebug for the errors,
and this makes sense as a root cause - remove PD and things work again.
So I had to dumb things down a bit in the next release in order to avoid
the IDE stack errors.
But were they true logic errors or simply compilation errors thrown by
undeclared variables? If the former we would expect them to show up
even after PD is removed, no?
A little background may be amusing if not useful:
The explicitVars property was adopted by Dr. Raney from SuperCard, where
it required an expensive rewrite of SC's Runtime Editor to accommodate
it, and a community-wide rewrite of all libraries as well. Some
community libraries were updated, some not, resulting in a mixed world
of compatibility issues in which this new global property could only be
relied on if you limited your use of other people's code because every
other script in play would be affected by it.
After all, one of the defining characteristics of xTalks is that they
declare and coerce variables dynamically, a freedom still enjoyed by many.
I asked the SuperCard engineer who implemented it why he did so, since
no customer nor anyone on the team had ever requested it. He said, "It
enforces discipline". Indeed it does. I believe it's relevant to note
that after leaving the SuperCard project that engineer went on to write
device drivers, and for all his excellent C skills he once told me he
not only never used any scripting language for anything but testing what
he'd written in C, but he didn't even like them.
Discipline is often a good thing, but a scripting engine is not a
dominatrix. LiveCode's temporal application of explicitVars at
compile-time only is IMO a good middle path, allowing it to be useful
for one's own work when preferred but still allowing others to write
according to their own preferences as well.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
[email protected] http://www.FourthWorld.com
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