Initialization should be done in your constructor, or when the variable is declared. Don''t rely on your compiler for that. What if the compiler initializes it to something you don''t want?

Turn on compiler warnings, and then fix them. Make the compiler treat warnings as errors, and not actually complete until there are no warnings. The compiler will warn about use of uninitialized variables, when the right switches are turned on.

Warnings are your friends. Almost as good friends as the debugger.

That actually reminds me of an interesting piece of code I saw once where the top of the header looked like this:

#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)#pragma warning(disable : xxxx)

Why? Because the original programmer thought the warnings were "stupid". Oi.

Not necessarily. There are some warnings generated by MSVC that are caused by their STL code (and possibly in other things too). Some of these warnings can be very annoying because they''ll show up in huge quantities or be really long messages so they''ll make it tougher to find the compiler errors in the list.

The particular offender I can think of off-hand is std::map. It throws warnings about symbol names being too long (because there''d be several indirections through classes, all of them requiring template parameters and so on) and once a symbol exceeds 255 characters (I think) the compiler will spit out a warning.

Changing the warning level can help but will disable other warnings you might actually want to see, so you can disable individual warnings to hide warnings like those and still see the ones you like. Though my std::map example isn''t a great one because the compiler seems to ignore the #pragmas that disable those specific warnings (it''s a known bug and I don''t remember if they fixed it in a service pack).

That said though, there''s still the possibility that that coder just didn''t want to see any warnings and disabled everyone he was getting instead of disabling them altogether...

-Auron