Re: C bug of the day

["Ron Natalie" <ron@sensor.com>]

"Terje Sletteb" <tslettebo@chello.no.nospam> wrote in message news:WXiGa.11515$KF1.273500@amstwist00...
 > > > I am sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you were being sarcastic.
 > > If your suggestion was adopted, how would it affect existing
 > > programs? For that matter, why would you ever *want* uninitialized
 > > variables?
 >
 > Reading from streams is an obvious example:
 >
 > int i;
 >
 > stream >> i;
 >
 > Intialising "i" beforehand would just be vasteful.

It wouldn't break anything, just make it a tiny bit slower.   If you allowed something to inidicate
uninitialized, you could get the performance back.

     int i;                // initialize to 0
     stream >> i;

     auto int i;        // recycle auto to mean uninitialized.
     stream >> i;

In the above case existing code that used the unqualified name would work in old and new compilers
(with a slight performance hit in the new complier), those in the second case would work the same way
in the old and new compiler (the same way it used to).

The failure to initialize all variables is one of the major inconsistancies of C++, along with the braindamaged
way arrays work.



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