On Monday, 18 April 2022 at 10:26:16 UTC, HuskyNator wrote:
On a sidenote, I'm surprised D did not choose 0 as the default floating value. Doesn't almost every language do this? I understand the thinking behind it, but when the type one uses in a template influences the behavior of the code, that seems like a pretty big red flag to me. (Any non-floating type defaults to 0, but using floats/doubles suddenly introduces NaN, surely I'm not the only one that sees a problem with this 😅) Especially when it's basically a standard 0 is used for this. Sorry for the rant.
I agree, it's a hiccup. I have at times intentionally initialized a float as NaN so that I can identify later whether an appropriate value has been assigned, but I've never seen the need to have this be the default behavior when integer types always init to 0 (more specifically, init to a MODIFYABLE value). In game design I have tons upon tons of floats that all [should] start initialized to zero. I can add 4 to a declared but not-assigned-to int and it'll be 4, a float remains NaN. Having to manually declare appropriate init values to each one doesn't aid me in detecting "bugs". If I had an int that was supposed to default to 10 instead of 0 it would still be a bug if I forgot to specify that, tripping me up for falsely assuming floats would start at 0 doesn't aid my workflow in any way. The whole "you should pay more attention to what you're initializing, o buggy programmer you" philosophy seems like something that should be reserved for pointers and reference types, not basic numeric data. It's probably set in stone by this point though and too late to change.
Ten years ago, almost to the day: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/thsjtreegdwcgbazh...@forum.dlang.org The reasoning still feels flimsy and stubborn.
