On 3/30/11 4:35 AM, Juanma Barranquero wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 06:10, Daniel Colascione
> <dan.colascione@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Even if it's not particularly common, being consistent with Common Lisp and
>> having fewer special cases are good things.  Some people use constructs like
>> this to create module-private variables (which is a bad idea, but that
>> doesn't stop people doing it.)
> 
> Why a bad idea? It's a common idiom for private, persistent variables.

Well, it's a great idea if you're into that kind of thing.  Personally,
I feel that having the ability to peer inside a module's state and see
what's wrong is helpful, and truly private variables don't add much over
having a naming convention that discourages casual modification.