[Info-vax] Variable declarations, was: Re: improving EDT

[Simon Clubley]

On 2016-11-19, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2016-11-18, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>> I've had many criticize me for not declaring all variables.  My response has 
>>> been "that's the compiler's job, why should I do such work?".  Nothing different 
>>> in having tools that attempt to do the grunt work for you.
>>>
>> 
>> They are absolutely right to criticise you IMHO. Declaring variables
>> is protection against some types of silly typing errors and in more
>> modern traditional style languages this is a requirement (or you
>> get an undeclared variable error during compilation).
>> 
>
> So, who died, and left you god of variables?
>

It's an opinion formed from exposure to a good range of programming
languages and environments.

BTW, have you ever tried a type safe language such as Ada or one of
the Wirth languages ? I'm assuming no on the former, but I don't know
about the latter.

Declaring variables is only the very first step towards safer code.

Even _C_ requires that you declare all your variables and that you
declare your intentions by declaring the types of the variables, at
least at a basic level. (However, languages like Ada take it to a far
higher level with the range of strictly enforced user defined types
you get there.)

> It's worked for over 40 years for me.
>

Unfortunately, what works for you doesn't work in other environments.

> YMMV

Very true.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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