Wise use of Globals for my Paradigm?

[PatMcC]

Hi Everyone

I just finished a program in Lua and I am really happy with it. However I committed at least two sins, I used a globals and I created a God object.

I work alone and my programs are under 2K lines of code. The program had this "design pattern" (if I can call it that)

Facts = {} -- start array
Facts["a"] = 1
Function Rules()
b = Facts["a"] * 2
end

I can start with a "starter" variable(variable "a") and then have "dependency" variables(variable "b")

"b"s value has to be updated in a function if the value of "a" changes.

Thanks for reading this far, the point is that with one global function and one global array I was able to drastically reduce the logic in my functions and I am happy with my program. Hopefully you will agree that these sins are forgiveable as I am not mixing code with others and the program is short, < 2 KLOC.

I would like to do something like this in C but arrays cannot have mixed values of strings and numbers and struct also needs to be predefined in terms of values as well.

I could simply make a whole bunch of global variables prefixed with a name such as CrazyProgrammerA = 1
CrazyProgrammerB = 2

etc, etc but surely this is extremely bad programming as i would likely end up with > 50 Globals. Is there any other way to create a C "value holder" that would only create one global and would allow mixed and random values? I guess really what I am looking for is a work around for the lack of hash tables in C.

Thanks-Patrick

[jwenting]

there is no wise use of globals.
The only good global is an eliminated global.

[griswolf]

Of course you can hold void *anyValue in C and cast it as appropriate. If you need to decide on the cast at run time, then you can hold an array of

struct anyValue {
  char /* or int */ dispatchTag;
  void *pointerToRealStruct;
}