On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 15:51:21 UTC, Codifies wrote:
okay I should have carried on reading the blog, its so uninitialized values stick out when debugging...
Indeed, the initial value is not supposed to be useful, it's there because dealing with garbage memory when forgetting to initialize a variable is hard to debug. That's also why characters are initialized to 0xFF. Unfortunately, (associative) arrays and integers initialize to an empty array and 0 respectively by a lack of an 'invalid' value.
These are often useful initial values, so people who didn't know about / didn't agree with that philosphy started using default initialization. Even the 'Count fequencies of all 2-tuples' example on the dlang homepage uses an uninitialized associative array.
