Michel Fortin wrote:
On 2009-09-22 18:08:24 -0400, Justin Johansson
<[email protected]> said:
You forgot
char.init 0xFF
wchar.init 0xFFFF
dchar.init 0xFFFFFFFF
Andrei
Shhh; don't tell anybody; I left those out of the quiz to weigh in
favour of zero bit pattern init values.
(This trick, i.e. omitting information, is one I learned from the
Ministries of Statistics and (un)Employment.)
Seriously though, I imagine the D design choices to be influenced by
the desire to propagate NaN and invalid UTF in their respective cases
so as to detect uninitialized data errors. Hmm, guess one could argue
the init issue for eons.
Well, I see this as a problem because I've often relied on default
initialization being zero in my algorithms. I was bitten once when my
algorithm worked perfectly with char but not with wchar. Turns out that
char.init == 0 (contraty to what Andrei wrote) and wchar.init == 0xFFFF.
pragma(msg, char.init.stringof);
outputs '\xff' in D2, wchar and dchar have the same initializer:
'\U0000FFFF'.
If you rely on char initializer being the null character, use char c =
0, or else your char gets initialized to an invalid character, just like
floats get initialized to nan, other types have the invalid value as
either null or do not have an invalid value and use 0.
