Re: Dynamicly declaring arrays (was: Time to join the fold?)

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <794gg7$ib$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, dennison@telepath.com writes:

> I'm not entirely sure I can defend this aversion to declare blocks in a
> rational way, so if anyone has a rationale as to why its perfecly acceptable
> to have declare blocks liberally sprinkled throught their code, I'm all ears.

I use declare blocks for objects that are only of very local interest
because it makes it clear to the reader that there is no need to look
elsewhere for any references.

Perhaps subconsciously I think I may be adding runtime efficiency,
but obviously compilers could do this work as well with "just in time"
initialization in order to avoid initialization overhead during those
invocations which will never use the object.  I have no guarantee
that would be a priority for compiler implementers, and in one recent
situation I had decided _not_ to use declare blocks because initialization
of some rarely-used objects was tricky enough that I wanted to initialize
every time, to maximize the chances of run-time error detection even if
the path using the object would not be traversed.  It worked -- a defect
in my data assumptions was detected on a run where the object would not
actually have been used.

Larry Kilgallen