Simen kjaeraas wrote:
You misunderstand. The idea is this:void foo( ) { Object p; if ( m ) { p = new Object( ); p.DoSomethingThatNeedsToBeDoneNow( ); } // 20 lines of code here if ( m ) { p.doSomethingWeird( dataFromAbove ); } }
You're right, the real cases where this kind of thing occurs are much more complex. I just posted the thing boiled down.
And, of course, there's always a way to refactor the code to eliminate the spurious error message. But sometimes the result is as ugly as Pascal's efforts to prove you really don't need a 'break' statement in a loop.
The real problem with the spurious errors is that then people will put in an initialization "just to shut the compiler up." Time passes, and the next guy is looking at the code and wonders why x is being initialized to a value that is apparently never used, or worse, is initialized to some bogus value randomly picked by the long-retired programmer. I've seen code reviewers losing a lot of time on this issue.
In general, I am opposed to inserting dead code and unused values to get the compiler to accept the program. It makes the code harder to reason about. Everything in the code should have a purpose that goes towards understanding the code. If there's:
int x = 0; then it stands to reason that: 1. 0 is a valid value for whatever x is subsequently used for 2. this value of x is actually used When both of these are false, it is obfuscation and counterproductive.
