First Impressions!

[ketmar]

A Guy With an Opinion wrote:

> That is true, but I'm still unconvinced that making the person's program 
> likely to error is better than initializing a number to 0. Zero is such a 
> fundamental default for so many things. And it would be consistent with 
> the other number types.
basically, default initializers aren't meant to give a "usable value", they 
meant to give a *defined* value, so we don't have UB. that is, just 
initialize your variables explicitly, don't rely on defaults. writing:

	int a;
	a += 42;

is still bad code, even if you're know that `a` is guaranteed to be zero.

	int a = 0;
	a += 42;

is the "right" way to write it.

if you'll look at default values from this PoV, you'll see that NaN has 
more sense that zero. if there was a NaN for ints, ints would be inited 
with it too. ;-)