[REBOL] Re: Context misery
From: sanghabum:aol at: 5-Jun-2001 12:33
Thanks Joel and all for the various replies,
Maybe I'm thinking more like an Imperial stormtrooper than a Rebol, but the
Rebol model for contexts and global/local variables seems neither simple nor
straightforward, as several previous threads have suggested.
> Unless it is necessary, evaluating strings is generally not
> a good practice. Evaluating strings is less efficient than
> evaluating blocks, and the context of words in a string is
> not known.
> I strongly recommend taking that advice to heart! Trying to
> construct source code strings that DO what you want is tricky
> at best, and a potential source of highly subtle bugs at
> worst.
Thanks for TFM ref. I'd completely failed to R that part. Sounds like we've
both learnt from experience here.
> Why? If you can describe what you're trying to accomplish
> here, perhaps some of the old hands can offer some alternatives
> that won't be so tricky to deal with. For example...
Well, the moment, has passed. I coded what I wanted in another way--the code
involved builds a data update layout dynamically from a CSV file: first row
is the field names, subsequent rows the data, and it was generating global
variables from the field names. It seems like a good idea at the time.
Thanks again,
--Colin.