Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Can you nest subroutines in C?
Message-ID: <4001@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 9 Jul 89 13:07:18 GMT
References: <18215@usc.edu> <7223@cbmvax.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 27

There have been a number of articles by various people here that attempt to
minimise the importance of static declarations in C. The point is usually
brought up that things like Intuition structures should really be built
dynamically at run-time... which is true enough. But this is also a very
minor part of the universe of things that you want to use initialised data
for. Understandable, since this is an Amiga board, but it does tend to obscure
the problem.

Here are a few things that really belong as initialised data structures that
don't belong in external files or constructors. These things are also
appropriate for portable applications, so tricks like converting a data file
to an object module are inappropriate:

	Symbol Tables.
	Automatically generated data, such as Yacc or Lex tables.
	Help messages.
	Conversion tables.
	Internal databases.

The thing to consider here is that Modula requires that a program be written
procedurally. There's no simple way to organise data in a declarative manner.

Have a look at the Little Smalltalk on Fish Disk 37 for an example of a program
that greatly benefits from initialised data.
-- 
Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva      `-_-'
...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.hackercorp.com  'U`