A summary of D's design principles

[bearophile]

Simen kjaeraas:

> The former could be seen as bad style,

I think this is the relevant passage from the C Standard:

    Objects with static storage duration (3.7.1) shall be zero-initialized (8.5) before any other initialization takes place. Zero-initialization and initialization with a constant expression are collectively called static initialization; all other initialization is dynamic initialization. Objects of POD [plain old data] types (3.9) with static storage duration initialized with constant expressions (5.19) shall be initialized before any dynamic initialization takes place. Objects with static storage duration defined in namespace scope in the same translation unit and dynamically initialized shall be initialized in the order in which their definition appears in the translation unit. [Note:8.5.1 describes the order in which aggregate members are initialized. The initial- ization of local static objects is described in 6.7.]

So I think a C program that relies on having global floating point variables/arrays initialized to zero is formally correct.


> but certainly something someone would do.

In one of my D programs translated from C I have had to track down a not easy to find D1 bug (see enhancement request 4580) caused by the C code assuming global floating point values set to zero (in D2 signalling NaN may help track down such bugs).

Bye,
bearophile