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 a variable is used to "collect" the result of a longer block of nested ifs/elses... In those cases I sometimes keep the variable uninitialized, because it should be initialized later by one of the conditional branches.

The trick is: if I leave it uninitialized at first and then there's a bug in the long if/else block so the variable is never assigned, I can see that bug in Valgrind :-) which of course requires to frequently run the code (ideally the regular tests) through Valgrind.