OpenEuphoria

Re: A question about certain language features

• Posted by rforno at tutopia.com Feb 16, 2002
• 576 views

Well, I think it is worse to encounter a variable containing an arbitrary
default value instead of one you forgot to assign.
In the second case, you´ll get an execution error just at the point. In the
first one, you probably will get a difficult to trace error many sentences
after.
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Cuny" <dcuny at LANSET.COM>
To: "EUforum" <EUforum at topica.com>
Subject: Re: A question about certain language features



Robert wrote:

> In situations where it really doesn't matter how
> something is written, I think there are advantages to
> reducing the number of choices.

But in this case, it's not a matter of cosmetics. It actually *does* matter
how (and where) something is written. By splitting the declaration from the
assignment:

   integer foo
   ...
   foo = 123 -- default value

you increase the chances that the code will encounter an uninitialized
variable. And when that happens, the Euphoria interpreter stops, and
anything
the user was doing is permanantly lost.

That's been my experience with Euphoria.

Isn't the end goal to provide users with robust applications?

-- David Cuny