Jim,

>This si a violation of the basic programming principle of encapsulation, that is any routing should have everything it needs within it self or receive those things as parameters.

Ok. What to say about that suggested by other fellows in creating a global object and setting its properties, to play the role of public vars?

In this case any routine referencing that global object's properties won't (a) have everything it needs within itself (b) neither receive those things as parameters. It'll be a third way. For me it (declaring publics or creating a global object) seems two ways to do the same thing, in the specific aspect you've exposed.

I'm not trying to be irritant, please don't think that, but isn't this a kind of semantics discussion?

Anyway, to prove I'm open minded regarding this issue, I've created a new thread (Id 668100 - "Who Moved my Cheese?"), asking folk's help to put some light on my mind <s>

Regards,

Fernando