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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.830583555@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 151680767
references: <484274071wnr@diphi.demon.co.uk> <3180CF00.17D5@lmtas.lmco.com>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-04-27T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Ken Garlington said

"Actually, Normalize_Scalars cannot be used to ensure that objects are
initialized before use; in fact, it definitely cannot be used to ensure
objects have _valid_ values before use!"

That's half wrong and half right. The first half is wrong, NS definitely
causes all scalars to be initialized before use. The second half is right,
it is (deliberately) not the case that NS requires valid values.

The whole idea is to guarantee predictability by initializing everything
to a known and consistent value, WITHOUT necessarily providing a valid
value on which the proram could (incorrectly) depend.