On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 07:13:05AM +0900, ahoward wrote:
> ahhh.  you are correct there.  i still maintain, however, that requiring
> forward intialization on instance variables, due to ruby's dual
> delclare/define syntax, is more than requiring initialization (lhs expr), but
> is also requiring forward declaration/definition.  why not simply make
> 
>   attr_xxx :foo
> 
> initialize @foo to nil?  or is that what you were suggesting?

nil is very rarely the value I want my instance variable to have.  I'm
not sure that I've gained anything except complexity by having attr_xxx
intialize instance variables.  It's an interesting idea, though.

Paul