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From: dkeisen@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU (Dave Eisen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Follow up to How Do I Prototype this?
Message-ID: <1990Jul4.020738.10317@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 4 Jul 90 02:07:38 GMT
References: <351@demott.COM> <300@taumet.com>
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In article <300@taumet.com> steve@taumet.UUCP (Stephen Clamage) writes:
>
>How does one write a function which might or might not have a first
>argument of any type?  However you do it, I suspect the program
>would be very difficult to understand and maintain.  Some re-thinking
>of the program design would be in order.
>-- 


The behavior of the function can be determined by the value of a global
variable. 

The database package we use does something like this --- most of the database 
access functions take an optional database number which is needed only if you 
have opened more than one database and have not called 
d_setdb (int database_number) which tells the database library to
use the given database_number for all future database access functions. The
database library knows if this is the case by checking values in db_global,
a global variable that stores all of the global database information.

I don't agree with this design decision, but it isn't horrible either.




--
Dave Eisen                      	    Home: (415) 323-9757
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