[DGD] Re: My idea for the DGD driver - validate

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Robert Forshaw wrote:
> I thought it would be obvious from my
> posts that I'm not so inept as to not know what they are.

I cannot help but say that that conclusion was not obvious to me
at all.

> As to the 'static'
> being ommited, yes I didn't mention static. I thought I had. Not that it
> matters, since none of it was really applicable to my post.

The fact that static is in fact quite applicable to your post
could only confirm the non-obviousness of the earlier conclusion.

Dworkin wrote:
> >Regarding calling security, I think one mistake was made during the
> >inception of LPC: functions (and variables) should be private by
> >default.  Unfortunately it is now too late to change this.

Actually I think this was probably a correct call, at least back
in the 1980s when it was done. In a world where most wizards are
not educated in computer science (definitely the case then, still
the case now most likely) having functions default to public makes
it a lot easier on the newbies and saves a lot of questions of
the form "I don't understand why my call_other doesn't work."
Anyone who needs private behavior can easily get it, and anyone
who wants to get in the habit of declaring all functions and
variables private can do so without too much damage. I have
the reverse case - in one language which defaults to private,
I am in the habit of automatically making everything public.
It does help that the program I'm writing in that language will
never be accessed (in source code at least) by anyone other
than me :) In code written or maintained by a team that would be
a bad habit to get into, I expect.

Steve

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