Google SoC Project Proposal: Better Uninitialized Warnings

[Robert Dewar]

Manuel López-Ibáñez wrote:
> This is the project proposal that I am planning to submit to Google
> Summer of Code 2007. It is based on previous work of Jeffrey Laws,
> Diego Novillo and others. I hope someone will find it interesting and
> perhaps would like to act as mentor. Feedback is very welcome (eve
> negative feedback!!). I have other ideas as well, so I would like to
> know if this is a bad project or I am stepping on someone's toes as
> soon as possible.

Sounds like a useful project indeed. You might also want to consider
something like GNAT's Initialize_Scalars pragma, which causes all
scalars to be initialized to a pattern that can be set at bind time,
or even at execution time with an environment variable.

This has proved invaluable in combination with these kind of
warnings for tracking down uninitialized variables. What you do
is vary the pattern, and if you see a difference in behavior,
something is wrong!