From: Kevin Bullock <kbullock@...>
Date: 2004-06-19T07:56:23+09:00
Subject: Re: a newbie question about main, Object...

On Jun 18, 2004, at 1:43 PM, Sam Sungshik Kong wrote:

> Excellent explanation, Kevin!

Glad I could help.

> Kevin, what is the right way to think about a global variable?
> In pure OO, there's no real global variable, right?
> Then, is it against OO?

There's likely to be differing opinions on this matter. I don't think 
it's necessarily against good object-oriented style to have global 
variables available in a language. This seems to fit in well with 
Ruby's approach to interacting very easily with the surrounding system, 
but still having everything be an object. Ruby preserves information 
hiding and encapsulation for the general case, as one would expect, and 
chooses to also allow some variables to be globally accessible. They're 
seldom used and declared differently, which seems to discourage using 
them in places they're not meant to be.

There is an argument to be made, though, that allowing global variables 
does in fact break information hiding, and I have some affinity for 
that argument as well. But in practice, having globals is useful for 
covering Perl's problem space with Ruby, even if you never use them 
when covering Java's problem space.

Pacem in terris / Mir / Shanti / Salaam / Heiwa
Kevin R. Bullock