When are global variables acceptable?

Posted by dsimcha on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by dsimcha
Published on 2008-12-10T19:07:55Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 19:23 UTC
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best-practices

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subjective

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anti-patterns

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global-variables

Everyone here seems to hate global variables, but I see at least one very reasonable use for them: They are great for holding program parameters that are determined at program initialization and not modified afterwords.

Do you agree that this is an exception to the "globals are evil" rule? Is there any other exception that you can think of, besides in quick and dirty throwaway code where basically anything goes? If not, why are globals so fundamentally evil that you do not believe that there are any exceptons?

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