A Guy With an Opinion wrote:
That is true, but I'm still unconvinced that making the person's program
likely to error is better than initializing a number to 0. Zero is such a
fundamental default for so many things. And it would be consistent with
the other number types.
basically, default initializers aren't meant to give a "usable value", they
meant to give a *defined* value, so we don't have UB. that is, just
initialize your variables explicitly, don't rely on defaults. writing:
int a;
a += 42;
is still bad code, even if you're know that `a` is guaranteed to be zero.
int a = 0;
a += 42;
is the "right" way to write it.
if you'll look at default values from this PoV, you'll see that NaN has
more sense that zero. if there was a NaN for ints, ints would be inited
with it too. ;-)
