Jonathan M Davis wrote:
I'm sure that there are cases where it would be nice for the compiler to point out that you're uselessly assigning to a variable (especially if you're making a useless function call too), but it would cost the compiler too much in complexity and cost the programmer in many other cases by forcing them to either ignore warnings (which they should pretty much never do) or throw in pointless explicit initializations rather than letting the defaults do their job.
Having such be errors (or warnings) makes for a very annoying experience. For example, when you're commenting out code trying to find a problem, or when you're generating D source code from some DSL, etc., having unused variables or assignments happen often.
