why ; ?

[Michael Neumann]

Don wrote:
 > Yes, but when you have declarations, you can reduce that probability
 > dramatically by using meaningful identifier names. That doesn't work in
 > a language without them.
 >
 > HaveWeInitializedEverythingYet when elsewhere it is
 > HaveWeInitialisedEverythingYet
 >
 > (I've had examples like that in PHP).

Not neccessarily! The last 45 minutes I hacked up TypoCheck, which
inspects the source code of any Ruby application and will warn about any
potential mispelled local variable. I use the Levensthein distance for
that.

http://www.ntecs.de/projects/TypoCheck/

This will catch most cases, except very short variable names, as here
it's hard to distinguish a typo.

Of course it can never be as good as when manually declaring variables
(due to missing redundance).

 >> bugs(no variable initialization) > 100 * bugs(dangling pointers).
 >
 > Yes, I probably overstated the case for declarations. But my experience
 > with PHP is that absence of declarations is the number 1 source of bugs
 > in that language. And it manifests itself as an initialization problem
 > -- I DID initialise that variable, but because of a typo, I find that
 > it's unexpectedly zero!

So I guess PHP will just return a value if you read an uninitialized
local variable, while Ruby will very likely raise an exception.

Uhm, but I think it's getting very off-topic :)

Regards,

   Michael