Re: To Initialise or not

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

In article <Dr5H2B.5FD@world.std.com>,
I <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote:
> [stuff about explicitly initializing to null]

Ken,

Here's a real practical example, which might be more convincing than
vague notions of readability:

I have a program that uses access types.  I want to convert to using
integers, where the integers point into an array.  There are several
reasons you might want to do that.  E.g. if you know you only have a
small number of heap objects, you might be able to make the integer
smaller than an access value.  It might make it easier to manage your
heap in some way that is not directly supported for access types.

If you followed the convention of always explicitly initializing access
types (either to null or to whatever the right value should be), then
this conversion can be fairly mechanical -- change "Foo.all" to
"Heap(Foo)", where Heap is the array representing the heap.  Change
"null" to "Null_Pointer", where Null_Pointer is a constant initialized
to an integer number representing null, and so on.

- Bob