Hongwei Xi wrote:

> Certainly, we can replace ? with 0. But what is really achieved?
> I would say it is simply an illusion that a program is made safer
> by initializing each array upon its allocation. 

What's happening here is this: ocaml is basically a _functional_
programming language. In such a language there is no such thing
as a variable, _everything_ is a constant. In this view,
the notion that there can be an uninitialised variable
is absurd, since there are no variables!

This is not the case for procedural programming, IHMO.
But the framework of ocaml is functional first, with
adaptions for procedural programming. In particular,
because of the way the underlying run-time system works,
uninitialised pointers would cause the garbage collector to core dump.
(and almost all ocaml values are represented by pointers).


-- 
John (Max) Skaller at OTT [Open Telecommications Ltd]
mailto:maxs@in.ot.com.au      -- at work
mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au  -- at home