Is it bad practice to initialize a variable to a dummy value?
- by froadie
This question is a result of the answers to this question that I just asked.
It was claimed that this code is "ugly" because it initializes a variable to a value that will never be read:
String tempName = null;
try{
tempName = buildFileName();
}
catch(Exception e){
...
System.exit(1);
}
FILE_NAME = tempName;
Is this indeed bad practice? Should one avoid initializing variables to dummy values that will never actually be used?
(EDIT -
And what about initializing a String variable to "" before a loop that will concatenate values to the String...? Or is this in a separate category?
e.g.
String whatever = "";
for(String str : someCollection){
whatever += str;
}
)
