To Initialise or not

[Steve O'Neill <smoneill@sanders.lockheed.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> In article <318109B1.3B54AFBF@escmail.orl.mmc.com>,
> Theodore E. Dennison <dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com> wrote:
> >I suspect it is silent on this issue, because the Ada (83) LRM is
> >NOT silent on the issue. Section 3.2.1(18) reads:
> >"The execution of a program is erroneous if it attempts to evaluate a
> > scalar variable with an undefined value."
>
> My personal coding convention is to *not* initialize variables if I know
> they will be properly initialized later.  <snip>

Another situation where initialization is ill-advised is when dealing with 
memory-mapped hardware registers.  It could be disastrous to write initial
values to such a register which is 'pre-initialized' by the hardware.  This 
is obviously a special case, but one that should not be ignored when dictating
that all variables be initialized by the software (either by developers or
automatically).

> As an aside, I always write ":= null;" when I want to *rely* on the
> initial value of a pointer, even though I know that pointers are always
> default-initialized to null.

You're not the only one. :)

-- 
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