On 26 Nov 2004, at 12:08, George Russell wrote:
Yes, you need to explicitly initialise it; but you don't need then to pass the initialized handle all around your code. The painful plumbing goes away. I think this is either unwieldy or inefficient. Imagine a large library containing lots of these things which need to be initialised if used. Then I predict that one of two things will happen (a) people will end up writing boilerplace code at the start of the main action which does initialise1 initialise2 ... blah blah ... (b) (more likely). There will be a single initialisation function for the library, which initialises everything, even the stuff you don't actually want.
To me this seems perfectly fine. Ian's proposal gets us TWIs, which I can see the need for. Implicit initialisation (i.e. stateful initialisation functions happening non-deterministicly, like java static{} blocks or C++'s similar feature) is a can of worms I currently see no value in opening. Jules