Version 1 of global

Updated 2001-11-13 19:58:32

global - Access global variables http://www.purl.org/tcl/home/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/global.htm

 global varname ?varname ...?  

This command is ignored unless a Tcl procedure is being interpreted. If so then it declares the given varname's to be global variables rather than local ones. Global variables are variables in the global namespace. For the duration of the current procedure (and only while executing in the current procedure), any reference to any of the varnames will refer to the global variable by the same name. (from: Tcl Help)

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Find out which globals you have with [info globals].

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Globals are expensive if you call them only a few times in the proc - the cost of the initial linking to a local variable weighs heavily; they are quite fast if you use them a lot (the breakeven seems to be around 15 reads ...). For fewer calls, use fully qualified variable names (::name) instead. (from: Can you run this benchmark 10 times faster)

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Globbing globals: Want to import several globals in one go, with glob wildcards (similar to the public statement in VB)? This comes from David Cuthbert (mailto:[email protected] ):

    proc globalpat {args} {
        foreach pattern $args {
            set varnames [info globals $pattern]
            if {[llength $varnames] != 0} {
               uplevel 1 global $varnames
            }
        }
    }

To use:

    proc hello {} {
        globalpat *tcl*
        puts $tcl_patchLevel
    }
  % hello
  8.2.2

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Using the variable command in place of [global] is often good practice, even when the variable is global. If you later decide that you want to encapsulate a group of globals in a namespace, you can do so easily. If you have something like:

   proc myProc {} {
       global myvar1
       global myvar2
       # ...
   }

you have to go off and edit a bunch of code if you later decide that myProc and its associated variables should be in a namespace. If instead you say:

   proc myProc {} {
       variable myvar1
       variable myvar2
       # ...
   }

the variables are still global, but the procedure becomes easy to encapsulate: just wrap it in [namespace eval]:

   namespace eval myNamespace {
       proc myProc {} {
           variable myvar1
           variable myvar2
           # ...
       }
   }

and now myvar1 and myvar2 are namespace variables. In general, you should use [global] only when you have a particular reason to make a variable global -- such as making it the text variable of a widget. Even then, consider something like:

    label .path.to.label -textvariable [namespace current]::varName

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