First Impressions!

[A Guy With an Opinion]

On Tuesday, 28 November 2017 at 04:12:14 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> 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. ;-)

Eh...I still don't agree. I think C and C++ just gave that style 
of coding a bad rap due to the undefined behavior. But the issue 
is it was undefined behavior. A lot of language features aim to 
make things well defined and have less verbose representations. 
Once a language matures that's what a big portion of their newer 
features become. Less verbose shortcuts of commonly done things. 
I agree it's important that it's well defined, I'm just thinking 
it should be a value that someone actually wants some notable 
fraction of the time. Not something no one wants ever.

I could be persuaded, but so far I'm not drinking the koolaid on 
that. It's not the end of the world, I was just confused when my 
float was NaN.