RE: Lightweight Lua Enumerations

["Gavin Kistner" <gavin.kistner@...>]

From: Rici Lake
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 11:52 PM
> On 28-Jun-07, at 12:43 AM, Gavin Kistner wrote:
> 
> > Would you do:
> >   GOOD = "good"
> >   SIN = "sin"
> >   COS = "cos"
> > and use the 'constant' variable for assignments and comparisons?
> > I realize the foolishness of that, but (even without a hack to
> > holler if I read an undefined global) it somehow feels cleaner
> > than just hardcoding the same literal strings in many places in
> > the code.
> 
> Why is it different to hardcode a literal string than to hardcode the 
> name of a literal string? Particularly since GOOD is just a shortcut 
> for _G["GOOD"] :)

It's not, and I grok the stringness of variable names. It just somehow
/feels/ cleaner :)

(Except, as parenthetically noted above, that I could have _G holler on
__index and it would tell me about a typo that wouldn't be so readily
identifiable if the typo was in a string literal. But...I never ever do
that.

Thanks for your input.