[Semi OT] Language for Game Development talk

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 27 September 2014 at 22:06:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 02:51:14PM -0700, Walter Bright via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>> The only interesting thing is he describes a way that 
>> functions (and
>> blocks) can specify what global data they access, and then 
>> have the
>> compiler issue errors for accessing any other global data. He 
>> has a
>> way to do that both locally and transitively.
>
> That sounds like PHP. *shudder*
>
>
>> However, the same effect can be achieved via pure annotations 
>> and
>> passing the globals needed by reference as function parameters.
> [...]
>
> I'm a fan of grouping related globals into structs with module 
> level
> instances, and passed by reference to functions that need those 
> specific
> globals. Truly-global globals are nasty, as are open sets of 
> globals
> where you either don't access a global, or you (potentially) 
> access
> *all* globals with no finer access granularity. (I had to debug 
> C code
> that did that once... boy it was mind-bending when every 
> function call
> could potentially arbitrarily change the global state.)
>
>
> T

A fair amount of HPC code is still written in Fortran with a 
variables.f90 file that holds most program state as globals. Ick.