bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
The idea is that for long arrays, often only the start of it needs
initialization to anything but 0.
I got the idea well, but my idea is that it's bug-prone syntax, because it's
partially implicit (I have put a bug in a program of mine because of that
syntax). How often do you need that? Is such frequency worth the risk? Can
you tell me some cases?
I have used it, though I use statically initialized arrays at all very rarely.
An example is the _ctype[] array which leaves the upper 128 entries unspecified,
and therefore 0.
I have not had to use it so far :-) And the syntax
like the arr[$] = [...] can avoid some of those bugs because you don't need
to count items.
And even if you are right, and it's a common need (other people here can
confirm), then I am asking for an explicit syntax to ask for a partial
initialization, to avoid bugs.
Anytime you statically initialize an array with more than a small number of
values,
it's bug-prone, even if the number of elements match the dimension. There's no
check
against transposing entries, or mis-typing the entries themselves.
Your options are to either write unit tests for the table, or have the table
generated by another program.
Dmd uses program-generated tables for this reason.
C99 supports it as well.<
C is known to be the less safe language among the ones used today (today
people use C, Java, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Delphi,
etc).
I know, I just wished to point out that it was not a unique language element.
