Accumulate and fire

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"Accumulate and fire" is a programming style in which the program sets a number of global variables or objects, then invokes subprograms or methods which operate on the globally set values.

This is considered problematic because:

it is not evident when reading the program which globals serve as arguments,
programmers can forget to set a value before invoking,
the state can change in a moment between setting and invoking, particularly when programming with threading,
the global variables may be corrupted by being unintentionally used to pass values to more than one subroutine.
it makes the use of recursion much more awkward.

Some older programming languages make this style hard to avoid: this is the only way of passing arguments to a paragraph in COBOL.

Accumulate and fire is considered an example of an anti-pattern.

Accumulate and fire

See also