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 mwie...@ahsoftware.net _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution