Docs: Section on local variables

[Timon Gehr]

On 04/20/2012 12:07 PM, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 09:55:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> It's funny, I once argued strongly in favor of this *against* Walter.
>> I lost
>> of course ;) IIRC, his argument was that it would require perfect flow
>> analysis and that's too difficult and expensive.
> My argument was that it
>> didn't need to be, and perhaps even *shouldn't* be, perfect. He felt that
>> would end up being a PITA with false errors, and I felt that C#
>> demonstrates
>> it isn't a PITA. Meh, I don't want to re-debate it though.
>
> Yeah, I am aware of Walter's previous statements on this. I think it's
> ridiculous that he wants his language inferior to virtually every one of
> its modern contemporaries in this aspect based on implementation issues.

Why do you think it is an implementation issue? D already requires an 
implementation to have flow-analysis.

> I like D's well-defined default-initialization and I think it's great
> for global storage, TLS and class/struct fields, but I think local
> variables require a hybrid approach. It doesn't matter if the
> implementation isn't perfect;

It certainly does. Compiler errors for non-issues hamper productivity 
and are good for nothing.

> it's better than the alternative, which is
> our current abysmal situation.
>

'abysmal'? Seriously? This could go either way, and personally, I like 
the current way better.

Maybe the implementation could be non-conservative: The warning would 
pop up only if it can be proven by flow-analysis that a local variable 
is accessed without preceding explicit initialisation. Anyway, why would 
this be such a huge deal?