Re: Coding Standards

[Ken Garlington <garlingtonke@lmtas.lmco.com>]

Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> 
>     - ALL variables must be initialised before they are used,
>         WHETHER THE LANGUAGE WILL INITIALISE THEM OR NOT.
> 
>         This means I don't _care_ what Ada initialises pointers to,
>         and I don't care what C initialises top-level variables to
>         either. ...

> I understand why Ada initialises pointers to null, and I wouldn't want
> that changed, but if I want to check that a variable is properly
> initialised, I want to _see_ an initialisation.

Is this because you don't trust the compiler to obey the language rules in
this area, or some other reason?

Furthermore, what about cases like:

(1)  type Some_Thingy_Type is record
      Some_Component : Integer := 0;
     end record;

     Foo : Some_Thingy_Type; -- or should I explicitly initialize it?

(2)  type Name_Type is String(1 .. 10);

     Blank_Name : constant Name_Type := (others => ' '); -- is "others" too implicit?

> For teaching purposes, at any rate, I am
>  *for* any tool that will help to detect uninitialised variable use
>  *against* any "solution" to the problem that requires programmer
>      intervention; if the students were savvy enough to use such a
>      solution, they wouldn't need it so much.

This is certainly useful; do you see your coding standard as a "tool" in this
context, or are you saying that you would like analysis tools and language
features (e.g. Normalize_Scalars, 'Valid) as "tools"?

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