understanding scope and m. variables (again)

Here's a few rules:

• Functions have separate scopes. - Every variable you use should be defined within the function, passed in as an argument, or accessed from m.


• Blocks do not have a scope of their own. - Variables defined within a block continue to exist outside that block. Normal for PHP users, different for many other languages. Personally, I find it causes more problems than it helps with me.


• Only count on globals if using procedural code - m is a handy built-in for accessing globals, but it's overloaded to be used for object attributes as well. Any object oriented code you write will have a hard time accessing those globals, unless you write some wrapper function(s) to access the globals for you.

To clarify that last point, see the following

function setFoo()
    m.foo = "bar"
end function

function getFoo()
    return m.foo
end function

object = {
    foo: "not bar"
    getObjectFoo: getFoo
}

' set global m.foo = bar
setFoo()

' print global m.foo
print getFoo() ' prints "bar"

' print object foo
print object.getObjectFoo() ' prints "not bar"

But come to think of it, a more general (but slower) global mechanism would be this:

function rdglobalGet(name as string) as dynamic
    return m[name]
end if

function rdGlobalSet(name as string, value as dynamic) as dynamic
    oldValue = m[name]
    m[name] = value
    return oldValue
end function

That should allow global access from anywhere, even within a method (as long as those functions themselves are not turned into methods).