From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c1131ea1fcd630a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) Subject: Re: To Initialise or not Date: 1996/05/10 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 154123593 references: <318508FE.204B@sanders.lockheed.com> <3190A8D3.3D53@lmtas.lmco.com> organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-05-10T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , I 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