Re: Why are people so afraid of globals?

[Matthew Wild <mwild1@...>]

On 9 July 2010 14:18, steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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').
>

In my opinion, it would. I really dislike the distinction between
"nothing" and "nothing" in Javascript.

> 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.
>

I think I wouldn't mind a 'global' keyword which imports selected
variables from the global environment, similar to (shudder) PHP.

Matthew