Re: C bug of the day

["Balog Pal" <pasa@lib.hu>]

"James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in message
news:Xns9398BD1E07E3Ejimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1...

> I am sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you were being sarcastic.
> If your suggestion was adopted, how would it affect existing
> programs? For that matter, why would you ever *want* uninitialized
> variables? Another way to ask that is when is initialization a bad
> thing?

In a C-like langage it's good to have option to not initialise something
(right where it's created). When you write stuff that is time-sensitive
unneeded memory access is bad.

The problem is not with existance of that feature but its being the default.
A dengerous and rarely needed feature should be an 'I explicitly ask for'
thing.

Example to noinit is a case where you need a variable only on certain path
of execution. On that path it is inited and used, the others do not touch
it.   There are cases you don't put the whole path in a single if.
Another example is when you grab a local buffer char[64k]. And wrute some
small amount of data into it. Or immediately load it with data from
somewhere. Default initing the whole is just a waste of time.

Paul



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