Initializing a variable in dmorgo's code would also be trivial. Your suggestion forces the programmer to do a lot of extra typing up front in order to maybe save a small amount of typing later, which seems like a poor tradeoff.

I would also argue that dmorgo's code has a clarity advantage in that it is immediately obvious which variables don't have default values and which do.

In reply to Re^2: Summing repeated counts for items stored in separate file by mrpeabody
in thread Summing repeated counts for items stored in separate file by dmorgo

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