Feature request: Attribute with which to enable the requirement of explicit-initialization of enum variables

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, June 03, 2013 04:57:28 Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 6/3/13, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:
> > This is like how Java forces you to directly initialize things when it
> > doesn't think that you've initialized them elsewhere. D did _not_ take
> > that route. It when with have an init value for every type and
> > initializing with that.
> Yes, but we do have float.init which is NaN. We don't have the
> equivalent for enums.

The situation is exactly the same with ints. We don't have an actual error 
value. 0 is the best we have. If you want something that's effectively invalid, 
then creating an "invalid" value as the first enum value as you already 
suggested would be the correct thing to do. Whereas what you're suggesting in 
this thread would be the equivalent of making

int i;

illegal, only your suggestion is specifically for enums.

If programmers don't want to risk using the default value for one reason or 
another, then they can choose to directly initialize it. I see no reason to 
force that upon them, and it goes against how the rest of the language is 
designed. Your suggestion for an "invalid" value for the first enum value was a 
good one and should be enough IMHO if you don't want the default enum value to 
be valid.

- Jonathan M Davis