On Wednesday, 13 November 2013 at 01:37:15 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Except that pretty most of your examples don't seem like they
would fail any
more than T.init would. int.max / 2 in so no more valid or
invalid than 0. The
only difference I see would be that by setting
pointers/references/arrays to a
weird value rather than null, they'll be treated as if they
have a value and
then blow up rather than blowing up on a null value. For all
the built-in
types, T.init is essentially supposed to be as invalid as the
type can get
without pointing off into memory that it shouldn't be
addressing.
So, the only thing I see that this suggestion does over using
T.init is that
on pointers/references/arrays, you won't end up with code that
checks for null
and avoids blowing up. Code that checks for null would then
blow up just as
much as code that assumes that the pointer/reference/array was
non-null. But
that's the only difference I see, since none of the other types
end up with
values that are any more invalid than T.init.
- Jonathan M Davis
+1. Essentially, I don't see how any of this is better than .init.
What about user defined types? How do you want to deal with
those? Recursively search all basic types and set them to the
above mentioned values?
