Should Local Variable Initialisation Be Mandatory?

Question

The maintenance problems that uninitialised locals cause (particularly pointers) will be obvious to anyone who has done a bit of c/c++ maintenance or enhancement, but I still se

Answer 1

Sometimes you need a variable as a placeholder (e.g. using the ftime functions), so it doesn't make sense to initialize them before calling the initialization function.

However it wouldn't be bad, in my opinion, to annotate the fact that you are aware of the pitfalls, something in the way of

uninitialized time_t t;
time( &t );