Re: Why are people so afraid of globals?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Antonio Vieiro <antonio@antonioshome.net> wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance, but C has no namespaces and there's no problem in
> building large applications on top of it, right?

Very true, but C requires everything to be declared up-front.  Lua
will automatically declare an unknown variable to be global
(global-as-default), so any misspelling will cause a runtime problem
since the new variable will have the value 'nil'.  (Perhaps it
wouldn't be so bad if the initial value was something like
'undefined').

It's a question of scale.  A 100-line script does not have to worry
too much about locals and globals, but a 100Kloc program has to be
more careful, especially with global-as-default.

steve d.