Re: Uninitialized "out" parameters

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Mike said

  "Indeed. A compiler should give a warning, and in my experience, does,
  if it can make a reasonably good guess. Some compilers (I think)
  provide a compile-time flag that the programmer wants to treat warnings
  as though they were fatal errors. I don;t see anything in gnatinfo to
  suggest that GNAT does this, though."

Mike, remember that GNAT is part of gcc, *all* the usual gcc options apply,
as documented in the gcc manual. The following is from gnatinfo.txt:

  In the usual procedures for using GNAT, Ada source programs are compiled into
  object files using the driver program 'gcc' with the option '-c' (compile
  only). Gcc recognizes the ada filename extensions .ads and .adb (discussed
  more thoroughly below) and calls the actual compiler, 'gnat1' to compile the
  source file.  Gcc has many switches explained in your gcc documentation.  In
  addition, gcc passes certain switches to gnat1.  These (with a couple of
  exceptional abbreviations) are spelled on the gcc command line by "-gnatXXX".

In "your gcc documentation" you will find the switch -Wuninitialized, which,
used together with -O, causes gcc to give warnings for uninitialized
variables. The GNAT frontend also catches some cases itself.