Re: Implicit Globals - A compile time solution.

["Greg Falcon" <veloso@...>]

On 2/20/08, John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk> wrote:
> Yea, mailing list is a lousy way to have a long term discussion like this!
>  Maybe we could have an "architectural discussion" area of the wiki?
>
>  I keep coming across the "global by default is bad, local by default is
>  worse" statement, but I've never seen a convincing justification for it.
>  There's lots of code examples that people claim "don't do what you'd
>  expect", but mostly they do exactly what I'd expect!

One case I haven't seen yet mentioned in this thread is the following:

do
  if test then
    a = 1
  else
    a = 2
  end
  print(a)
end

which under your proposal would print nil!

It's certainly a matter of opinion, but my opinion is that is quite
bad, and very hard to justify to novice coders.

As has also been mentioned, a=a+1 meaning "create a new local set to 1
more than the global variable's value" would be quite disorienting as
well.

Greg F