Accumulate and fire

"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:

• 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.

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

See also: Petri net