[AccessD] more on early versus late binding

On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 05:38:27PM -0500, Mcgillivray, Donald [ITS] wrote:
> To the extent that I can call myself a programmer (not far I promise!)
> I'm totally self-taught, so when topics like this come up, I follow them
> with an eye toward expanding my knowledge and understanding of the finer
> points.  That said, I'm not sure I follow the distinction between the
> two examples you cite.  True, one assigns a specific value directly to
> the variable, while the other calls a separate function to do so, but
> the choice of one over the other is less a matter of speed versus
> flexibility than it is a matter of what's available at runtime to assign
> to the variable.  If the value is unknown until retrieved via some other
> process, there really isn't much choice, is there?  Similarly, if the
> value IS known and can be reliably coded into the procedure (number of
> days in a week, for example), why run some other procedure to retrieve
> it?  Whether "hard-coded" or dynamic, neither one actually does anything
> until the code is run, right?  Or am I misunderstanding something in the
> concept being illustrated?

If you bind a variable early, e.g.
     lngWibble = 47
then you have to go into the code and change the code if you want to change the value you are binding to lngWibble. If you bind late, e.g.
     lngWibble = ReadSomeFileAndFetchWibbleValue()
then you can change the value assigned to lngWibble by changing data in the file. Any can do this with a text editor and it doesn't require rewriting and recompiling the code. Configuration files all work this way.