response 21 of 28:

Mar 4 18:38 UTC 2009

Right, the idea that you might have intended those to be class fields
and hence of limited scope occurred to me after I posted resp:19.

The importance of modularization, limited scoping, and explicit levels
of abstraction were not always well understood.  A long time ago --
early 1980s -- I had the joy of having to add significant functionality
to a fairly large program that was written in Macro-10, the assembly
language for the Tops-10 operating system.  A few hundred pages of code,
all of which resided in one monolithic source file.  Dozens and dozens
of variables, all global of course.  Yuck.  

At one point I mentioned to the original author of the program that
sometime it might be worthwhile to rewrite it in modular fashion in a
high level structured language like C or Pascal.  The response was oh
no, can't do that, it would run much too slowly.  Even though 1980s
hardware had a fraction of the power of today's, I'm skeptical of that
point, and I'm sure I could have done the enhancements in a fraction of
the time it took me if the software had been written sensibly in a high
level language.