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

Yes: always initialize your variables unless you have a very good reason not to. If my code doesn't require a particular initial value, I'll often initialize a variable to a value that will guarantee a blatant error if the code that follows is broken.