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A study of global variables vs parameter passing

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_projects/b5645053r

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  • Program understanding is a very important part of the testing and maintenance phases of the programming projects. The overall program knowledge, understanding the various parts of the program, and how they communicate are key steps in understanding the program. Hence data communication among modules contributes much to program complexity and understanding. This paper describes a controlled experiment that compared two methods of data communi­cation : global variables and parameters. Two functionally equivalent programs were constructed to be identical except in the way they communicated data between their modules. One used glo­bal variables and the other used parameters. The subjects were students in sophomore, junior and senior level computer science courses. They were assumed to correspond to three levels of programming experience. The results of the experiment indicated no significant difference between the two versions of the program. However subjects with BASIC programming experience performed much better on the global variable version. Chapter two of this paper presents the motivation behind this study and describes the ways data can be shared among modules. The materials, subjects and administration of the experiment are discussed in chapter three. An analysis of the results is given in chapter four, and finally chapter five presents the conclusion.
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