On 11/25/17 5:13 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Saturday, 25 November 2017 at 16:16:52 UTC, A Guy With a Question wrote:
If D chooses it's defaults to make errors stick out, why not just
error at declaration if they don't explicitly set it to something.
It technically did:
https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#local-variables
"It is an error to use a local variable without first assigning it a
value. The implementation may not always be able to detect these cases.
Other language compilers sometimes issue a warning for this, but since
it is always a bug, it should be an error. "
But that paragraph was never implemented (it is a bit easier said than
done to actually detect given if conditions and stuff too, especially in
the early days of D when the compiler didn't even make any effort to
track such things, though it does now...). The compiler author took the
easy way out of initializing them to invalid values instead.
While it is more realistic to implement technically now than it was
years ago when the current behavior got in, I think we're at the point
now that so many people use it as a convenience thing on ints and nulls
that there'd be hell to pay if the compiler actually started calling it
an error :(
I rely on the default value initialization all the time! I don't know
how that would jive with structs, since they are technically local
variables, but usually are valid without initialization.
What about AAs? Would you have to do = []?
-Steve
