During a Smalltalk upgrade project I'm working on, I had some problems with shared variables that were being added to an existing namespace. Using the browser, I could find references to the methods that accessed those variables but I couldn't find how they were being added in the first place. Any way I searched for those variable names, I always drew a blank. I eventually found a method that created the variables by using string concatenation to build the name then directly adding those variables into the namespace. This technique meant that it was virtually impossible to find the creation of those variables using the normal toolset. It would have been just as easy for them to create a literal array with the variable names instead of using string concatenation and the literal array could have been found using the tools. The tools are your most reliable way to tell what the software is doing. Don't defeat them using a trick unless there's no other way to do it.
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