.init property for char[] type

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-09-22 18:08:24 -0400, Justin Johansson <procode at adam-dott-com.au> said:

>> You forgot
>> 
>> char.init 0xFF
>> wchar.init 0xFFFF
>> dchar.init 0xFFFFFFFF
>> 
>> Andrei
> 
> Shhh; don't tell anybody; I left those out of the quiz to weigh in 
> favour of zero bit pattern init values.
> (This trick, i.e. omitting information, is one I learned from the 
> Ministries of Statistics and (un)Employment.)
> 
> Seriously though, I imagine the D design choices to be influenced by 
> the desire to propagate NaN and invalid UTF in their respective cases 
> so as to detect uninitialized data errors.  Hmm, guess one could argue 
> the init issue for eons.

Well, I see this as a problem because I've often relied on default 
initialization being zero in my algorithms. I was bitten once when my 
algorithm worked perfectly with char but not with wchar. Turns out that 
char.init == 0 (contraty to what Andrei wrote) and wchar.init == 0xFFFF.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/