Torsten Bögershausen [off-list ref] writes:
Initializing a variable to "BAD" in the beginning can be a good thing
for two reasons:
- There is a complex if-elseif chain, which should set retval
in any case, this is at least what I expect taking a very quick look at the
code:
...
# The second reason is that some compilers don't understand this complex
# stuff either, and through out a warning, like
# "retval may be uninitialized" or something in that style.
# This is very compiler dependent.
And to help humans that unless some if/else chain explicitly says it
is OK, the caller receives BAD by default. In other words, it is
being defensive.
At least that was the reasoning behind the original code that did
not support SLOP.
So yes, the current code may seem to be over-eager and ask for
optimization, but we don't gain more that a couple of nano-seconds
or so. The good thing is that we have the code a little bit more
robust, when changes are done in the future.
True.