D2 port of Sociomantic CDGC available for early experiments

[Regan Heath via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2014 11:18:27 +0100, Leandro Lucarella <luca at llucax.com.ar>  
wrote:

> Regan Heath, el 17 de October a las 10:55 me escribiste:
>> >Regan Heath, el 14 de October a las 11:11 me escribiste:
>> >>>I still don't understand why wouldn't we use environment variables  
>> for
>> >>>what they've been created for, it's foolish :-)
>> >>
>> >>As mentioned this is not a very windows friendly/like solution.
>> >
>> >As mentioned you don't have to use a unique cross-platform solution,  
>> you
>> >can have different solutions for different OSs. No need to lower down  
>> to
>> >the worse solution.
>>
>> You've got it backwards.  I'm looking for a *better* solution than
>> environment variables, which are a truly horrid way to control
>> runtime behaviour IMHO.
>
> OK, then this is now a holly war. So I'll drop it here.

I think you've mistook my tone.  I am not "religious" about this.  I just  
think it's a bad idea for a program to alter behaviour based on a largely  
invisible thing (environment variable).  It's far better to have a command  
line switch staring you in the face.

Plus as Walter mentioned the environment variable is a bit like a shotgun,  
it could potentially affect every program executed from that context.

We have a product here which uses env vars for trace flags and (without  
having separate var for each process) you cannot turn on trace for a  
single process in an execution tree, instead each child inherits the  
parent environment and starts to trace.  And.. when some of those flags  
have different meanings in different processes it gets even worse.   
Especially if one of those flags prints debugging to stdout, and the  
process is run as a child where input/output are parsed.. it just plain  
doesn't work.  It's a mess.

R

-- 
Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/