Java vs Labview

[Greg McKaskle]

Ahh I see now. The way to solve this problem would be to enforce having an else (like the default case in the case structure), right? And if you initialize something in one place and not another, you'd have a broken wire much like a case statement would give you one.

I'm beginning to see how it might turn into a bigger problem than it solves though.

It is only a bigger problem if incorrect behavior is a small problem

You will find SW group policies that require else's for every if, require curly braces for every section, require a default for every case, require decoration about exceptions that can be thrown, etc. They do this because they have been bitten by bad conventions and their response is to make their language safer than it came from the factory.

Surprise, surprise, I have a story. I think it was my second assignment at college, and it written in C and was probably supposed to read a file, sort the contents, and blah, blah, blah. But the professor wanted to make a point, so we were only allowed to use if's and gotos. No else's, no for's, no whiles, no switches, etc. Try it sometime. It really makes you appreciate structure and modern language features.

Greg McKaskle