Re: To Initialise or not

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

In article <Dqsx4y.FHK@thomsoft.com>, Keith Thompson <kst@thomsoft.com> wrote:
>Because it's much more straightforward for access types (and for
>floating-point types: NaN, Infinity, etc.) than for integer types.
>It's easy to reserve as many special access values as you need.  Users --
>and hardware -- tend to expect each possible bit-pattern of an integer
>object to represent a valid integer value.  

When I say "type T is range 1..1_000_000;", there are *plenty* of extra
bit patterns for the compiler to use.  You're correct in those cases
where the range of the integer type matches the hardware, of course.

>...You could reserve the most
>negative integer in a two's-complement representation, but that gets
>complicated in the absence of hardware support.

Complicated?  It gets inefficient, that's for sure.  And it's annoyance
if you need the value -2**31.  But it doesn't seem particularly
complicated for the compiler writer.

- Bob