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From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
Subject: Re: To Initialise or not
Date: 1996/05/02
Message-ID: <Dqs9Mx.Ku1@world.std.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 152599478
references: <318508FE.204B@sanders.lockheed.com> <Dqq1F9.CK3@thomsoft.com>
 <318792E8.28CC1042@escmail.orl.mmc.com> <dewar.831032134@schonberg>
organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-05-02T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <dewar.831032134@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>Help means help. It does not mean solving the halting problem. It is
>perfectly fine and easy for a compiler to give warnings in simple
>cases (it is no different from giving these warnings for the cases
>of other datatypes, such as integer). You can do it some of the time,
>and that is helpful.

Yes, it is helpful, and it can be quite feasible to implement for local
variables.  But it's a lot harder for components of records on the heap,
accesses through complicated chains of pointers.  In most of the
programs *I* write (compilers and related tools), most of the data is
sitting in heap-allocated records, which is why I would like to have
run-time detection, in case the compile-time detection fails.

- Bob