Movement against float.init being nan

[Dukc]

On Friday, 19 August 2022 at 13:42:58 UTC, Hipreme wrote:
> Although the `char` is a bit different beast in terms of 
> breaking change, I really *can't see* anyone actually depending 
> that your float is being initialized with `nan`, so I really 
> would like to know how much people agree with this idea. It is 
> so common to stumble on that problem that it is starting to 
> feel as a real mistake.

I personally like how D does it. Once you know that floats have a 
"nothing" value, it's very convenient that it's the 
initialisation value, for the same reason `null` is a convenient 
initialisation value for pointers and class references. But I can 
see that if I didn't know about NaNs, this would be annoying. The 
big weakness is that it goes against what C, C++ and C# (and 
probably many other languages) do so one is easily surprised.

However, the big philosophy behind it is that D *always* uses an 
"empty" value as the initialisation value if there is one, so for 
D this is the right thing to do. Using 0 as float `.init` would 
be inconsistent with rest of the language. Whether this 
underlying philosophy is a good idea is debatable though. 
Personally I think the philosophy has it's ups and downs but easy 
to like once you get used to it.