What's Gonna Be My Penalty...

... for using lots of Globals...

performance wise, will it degrade my program significantly...

i'm using global variable instances of TYPEs that carry a lot of fields... is this a good way to 'pack' all those globally accessible variables so that i don't get penalized, or does it really not matter at all...


thanks

--Mike

I doubt it - even on a PC as slow as my old desktop this sort of issue has never been the bottleneck performance wise.

I only use globals.
and my types are always pre-defined by globals

Global p.player
Global e.enemy ; you get the point

I have to add that (though it may seem obvious) when I changed from globals to types a lot of my programming problems went away.

It's just good housekeeping, and in effect Blitz is acting as a spellchecker.

So instead of
Global CamX,CamY,CamZ

Use
TYPE Cam
FIELD x,y,z
END TYPE

Then you have variables Cam\x, Cam\y, Cam\z.

Just make sure and make your type identifier global, or else you might lose it :o)

Normally Globals are faster than more structured programming, such as when calling a function passing a variable adds a copy of a memory address whereas a global uses the existing variable. But global's are harder to work with from a software design POV. eg. If you pass a parameter to a function and change it, you're changing a local value and not affecting other functions, but if you use a global you're changing the global value which can affect other functions that use that same global. Plus without explicit declarations in Blitz if you say mispell a variable it'll not cause a compile error but you're program will be bust. Using types, the object must exist first, and using local variables I find I'm less likely to forget or confuse variable names with global names.

I'm with John. I put all of my variables inside of type instances - eliminating the debugging sessions associated with typos in variable names FAR outweighs any slight speed penalty I may incur.

thanks fellas for all the input...

--Mike