Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
language_fan wrote:
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:35:07 -0400, Jesse Phillips thusly wrote:
language_fan Wrote:
Now if you really want to throw some sticks into the spokes, you
would say that if the program crashes due to a null pointer, it is
still likely that the programmer will just initialize/set the value
to a "default" that still isn't valid just to get the program to
continue to run.
Why should it crash in the first place? I hate crashes. You liek them?
I can prove by structural induction that you do not like them when you
can avoid crashes with static checking.
No one likes programs that crash, doesn't that mean it is an incorrect
behavior though?
Have you ever used functional languages? When you develop in Haskell or
SML, how often you feel there is a good change something will be
initialized to the wrong value? Can you show some statistics that show
how unsafe this practice is?
So isn't that the question? Does/can "default" (by human or machine)
initialization create an incorrect state? If it does, do we continue to
work as if nothing was wrong or crash? I don't know how often the
initialization would be incorrect, but I don't think Walter is concerned
with it's frequency, but that it is possible.
Value types can be incorrectly initialized and nobody notices. E.g.
int min;
foreach(int value; list)
if (value < min) min = value;
Oops, you forgot to define a flag variable or initialize to int.min
You mean int.max :o).
Andrei
He just proved how enforcing initializers can still cause errors! I
didn't even think of that one!
:o)
