Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!agate!e260-2d!labc-1aa
From: labc-1aa@e260-2d.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Building A PostScript Toolset
Message-ID: <1989Aug30.184607.21647@agate.uucp>
Date: 30 Aug 89 18:46:07 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.uucp (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: labc-1aa@web.Berkeley.edu (Bob Heiney)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 31


A couple of points:

In order to minimize potential side effects, when you define names in a
ToolSet procedure, you should put them in their own dictionary. 
Start with a "n dict begin" where "n" is the number of locals you'll use, and
finish with an "end".

Example:

/MyProcedure 		% arg1 arg2 MyProcedure result
{
  2 dict begin
  /arg2 exch def /arg1 exch def

  ...

  end
} def

Also, "%%DEMO" *might* confuse some spooler software since it looks like
a document structuring comment (obviously, this is how you're using it, but
it isn't part of the standard).  How about just "% DEMO"?

Finally, my basic rule about using local variables is to make
a dictionary entry only if I'm going to use a value more than once.  A comment
can make up for not having defined a name for an argument.  I guess I'd
recommend trying to achieve a balance between naming and efficiency.

Bob Heiney
labc-1aa@web.Berkeley.edu