In retrospect, I think using getters and setters is probably better than exposing variables.

That's one way to do it, but I would actually recommend against that and suggest two alternatives instead. The reason is that if you simply encapsulate a global in getters/setters, then it's still a global, meaning you have the issue that one piece of code using your module might affect a different piece of code using the same module without meaning to, and also, if you don't use a package variable (our), that means that you're taking away the ability of users to use local to try and mitigate that effect.

So instead, my suggestions would be to just use an our variable, either that or make the module OO and make this variable a property of the object. That means that different pieces of code can change their settings on their objects without affecting each other at all.

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