----- Original Message -----
From: "David Brennan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> It would certainly be nice if Delphi did initialise local variables for
you
> where necessary. I suspect it initially wasn't done for performance
reasons

I think it's a design feature of Pascal, which was originally intended to be
a teaching language promoting good programming style circa 1970. In order to
enforce good "structured programming", anything that wasn't considered sound
practice was forbidden, and uninitialised variables could be counted on to
contain embarrassing garbage.

You weren't supposed to actually implement programs in Pascal - that's what
Algol, C and P/L-I were for - and it wasn't until Borland introduced "Turbo
Pascal" in the 80s, with its freer syntax, wider range of data types, and
lightning-fast compilation to highly optimised native code, that Pascal
started becoming a usable language.

Brian

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