General Issues in Using Variables

[[deleted user]]

I liked the advice in this chapter, especially the discussion of the pros/cons of early and late binding. There are many good practices illustrated here that I should more rigorously follow, and this chapter helps bring them to the forefront.

I don't think that this book covers the functional programming paradigm, which is a shame (OK, I know it is a big enough book already) because many of these side effect issues go away.

[Aleksander]

I like the suggestions of using easily recognizable fillers for initialization of working memory. This one may actually save me some debugging time in the future. There are many other good suggestions in Guidelines for Initializing Variables section. Just because author uses many C++ examples in this book I think he could mention the importance of using class member initialization list in Initialize a class’s member data in its constructor advice. Scott Meyers in Effective C++ book provides more detailed discussions on this and other topics about using variables in C++. Also, I like the discussion on measuring variable span and live times.

[Erik]

The last time I worked under a very formal coding policy, many of the strict coding standards were along the lines of topics from this chapter.

I would agree with most of the suggested behavior in this chapter. I'm guilty of most of these bug types if my life, but good practice (as suggested by this chapter) certainly helps avoid them.