Re: To Initialise or not

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <DqnGoz.10v@world.std.com>,
I wrote:

>Ideally, the language would require detection of uninitialized
>variables, and an uninitialized pointer would be different from a null
>pointer.  The reason for not doing that are for efficiency, of course.

By the way, it always seemed silly to me that Ada 83 required
default-initialization of pointers to null, but integers are totally
undefined by default.  The idea was that dereferencing an uninitialized
pointer is *really* bad, whereas reading an uninitialized integer is
only mildly bad.  But that's not true.  "Ptr.all := 1;" and
"Array_Var(I) := 1;" are both equally bad in that they can both
overwrite arbitrary storage (if Ptr and I are not undefined).  Ada 95
fixes the array reference problem -- it can no longer overwrite
arbitrary storage.

- Bob