To Walter, about char[] initialization by FF

[Unknown W. Brackets]

Andrew, I think there's a misunderstanding here.  Perhaps it's a 
language thing.

Let me define two things for you, in English, by my understanding of 
them.  I was born in Utah and raised in Los Angeles as a native speaker, 
so hopefully these definitions aren't far from the standard understanding.

Default: a setting, value, or situation which persists unless action is 
taken otherwise; such a thing that happens unless overridden or canceled.

Null: something which has no current setting, value, or situation (but 
could have one); the absence of a setting, value, or situation.

Therefore, I should conclude that "default" and "null" are very 
different concepts.

The fact that C strings are null terminated, and that encodings provide 
for a "null" character (or code point or muffin or whatever they care to 
call them) does not logically necessitate that this provides for a 
default, or logically default, value.

It is true that, as the above definitions, it would not be wrong for the 
default to be null.  That would fit the definitions above perfectly. 
However, so would a value of ' ' (which might be the default in some 
language out there.)

It would seem logical that 0 could be used as the default, but then as 
Walter pointed out... this can (and tends to) hide bugs which will bite 
you eventually.

Let us suppose you were to have a string displayed in a place.  It is 
possible, were it blank, that you might not notice it.  Next let us 
suppose this space were filled with "?", "`", "ﮘ", or "ß" characters.

Do you think you would be more, or less likely to notice it?

Next, let us suppose that this character could be (in cases) detectable 
as invalid.  Again note that 0 is not invalid, and may appear in 
strings.  This sounds even better.

So a default value of 0 does not, from an implementation or practical 
point of view, seem to make much sense to me.  In fact, I think a 
default value of "42" for int makes sense (surely it reminds you of what 
six by nine is.)

But maybe that's because I never leave things at their defaults.  It's 
like writing a story where you expect the reader to think everyone has 
brown eyes unless you say otherwise.

-[Unknown]


> Correct. As I said because of 0 is NUL in UTF-8 too. Not
> 0xFF or anything else exotic.