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God's own constants

Scott wonders whether God stored the universe's constants "as a readonly field in a static constructor or a singleton pattern, or assuming parallel universes, a factory pattern?"

He also presents a sample which unfortunately sports two serious bugs:

a) God doesn't use Hungarian notation for variables. He's a great supporter of the theory that choosing a reasonable name for a variable combined with an OO languages with strict type checking and extensible metadata render Hungarian notation pretty obsolete.

bGod also faced the problem that most constants aren't finite. Therefore he decided not to store them in any field. Instead he created methods which returned the results as a stream and combined these with some factory methods returning delegates to the helper functions thus creating a pretty pluggable architecture.

After implementing a prototype, he saw that streaming of infinitely long numbers doesn't work pretty well in a SOAP 1.1 based distributed environment incorporating multiple Universes. As an interim solution he therefore limited Reality to a single instance. Somehow he has been assigned to a different project in the meantime so we still live in a single Reality.

He seriously promises that the application is nevertheless scalable to multiple instances - if he only gets to fix the bug in the calculation of the answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Don't panic.

posted on Saturday, February 15, 2003 12:10 AM

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