[Q] To initialise or not.

[JP Thornley <jpt@diphi.demon.co.uk>]

We are currently looking at revision of the Ada coding standards 
(probably based closely on the Ada Quality and Style Guidelines as 
advised elsewhere).

However the issue of whether or not to require all scalar objects to be 
initialised has generated a substantial discussion without yet reaching 
a clear conclusion.  The Ada Quality and Style Guidelines are silent on 
this issue, so I would be interested in what other Ada users have found 
and what recommendations they would make.

Briefly, the argument for initialising everything is predictability of 
operation (by avoiding a read of an uninitialised value).  The 
argument against is that giving everything an initial value obscures the 
fact that some objects *should* be initialised (and the initial value 
has some significance) and other initialisations are there simply to 
follow the rule (and the value has no particular significance).

(Note that some projects will be using Ada 83 for some time yet, so 
pragma Normalize_Scalars isn't an option).

Thanks in advance.

Phil Thornley

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| JP Thornley    EMail jpt@diphi.demon.co.uk                           |
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