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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: [Q] To initialise or not.
Date: 1996/04/27
Message-ID: <dewar.830583437@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 151680765
references: <484274071wnr@diphi.demon.co.uk>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-04-27T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


"Briefly, the argument for initialising everything is predictability of
operation (by avoiding a read of an uninitialised value).  The
argument against is that giving everything an initial value obscures the
fact that some objects *should* be initialised (and the initial value
has some significance) and other initialisations are there simply to
follow the rule (and the value has no particular significance)."

It is a shame to damage the readability and maintainability of code by
providing junk initializations. The desire for predictability is however
reasonable. There is no good solution in Ada 83. Really pragma
Normalize_Scalars is the only satsifactory answer here.