On 11/6/2010 01:12, spir wrote: > On Fri, 05 Nov 2010 23:13:44 -0600 Rainer Deyke <rain...@eldwood.com> > wrote: >> That's a faulty idiom. A data structure that exists but contains >> no valid data is a bug waiting to happen - no, it /is/ a bug, even >> if it does not yet manifest as incorrect observable behavior. (Or >> at best, it's an unsafe optimization technique that should be >> wrapped up in an encapsulating function.) > > You may be right as for local variables. But think at elements of > structured data. It constantly happens that one needs to define > fields that have no meaningful value at startup, maybe even never > will on some instances.
It doesn't happen in dynamic languages. It doesn't happen in pure functional languages, since these languages provide no way to alter a data structure after it has been created. In my experience, it happens very rarely in C++. If it happens "constantly" in D, then that's a flaw in the language. -- Rainer Deyke - rain...@eldwood.com