Yeah, a lot of it is just semantics. While my own internal thinking on the subject draws a bit fuzzier line than what crossrulz describes, I think his hardline definition is the most sensible and defensible one to try to adopt (or "enforce") community-wide. It is utterly clear and that alone is a huge first step toward a shared understanding.
2 related things to add. One is that there *can* be some debug usefulness to a pure FGV that only supports get and set operations. A conditional breakpoint within the set case can help reveal which *caller* of the FGV has set the bad value that breaks the code. You can't do that with a native global.
The other is that when the global data is a cluster, wrapping up access in a function call provides a mechanism to make "set" actions on individual cluster elements atomic. See this current, ongoing thread for more info.
-Kevin P
CAUTION! New LabVIEW adopters -- it's too late for me, but you *can* save yourself. The new subscription policy for LabVIEW puts NI's hand in your wallet for the rest of your working life. Are you sure you're *that* dedicated to LabVIEW? (Summary of my reasons in this post, part of a voluminous thread of mostly complaints starting here).
