Strongly agree with the preceding Anonymous post. Put different packages in different files no matter how large or small they are. (After all, now you always know where it is!) It is also a good idea to provide functions in a package to manipulate variables in that package, if only to document (within the package) that the value is used elsewhere. Some pragmas and constructs exist because someone needed them at the time, not because they represent the most-maintable way to write code, especially in a large project. Also, insofar as possible, try to continue a project so that it consistently does things in one way throughout. It is much harder to maintain code that does the same thing in two ways, old and new.