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An undefined variable in the source code of a computer program is a variable that is accessed in the code but has not been declared by that code. [1] In some programming languages, an implicit declaration is provided the first time such a variable is encountered at compile time. In other languages such a usage is considered to be sufficiently ...
The final value of k is undefined. The answer that it must be 10 assumes that it started at zero, which may or may not be true. Note that in the example, the variable i is initialized to zero by the first clause of the for statement. Another example can be when dealing with structs.
Another benefit from allowing signed integer overflow to be undefined is that it makes it possible to store and manipulate a variable's value in a processor register that is larger than the size of the variable in the source code. For example, if the type of a variable as specified in the source code is narrower than the native register width ...
In the C and C++ languages, such non-portable constructs are generally grouped into three categories: Implementation-defined, unspecified, and undefined behavior. [3] The exact definition of unspecified behavior varies. In C++, it is defined as "behavior, for a well-formed program construct and correct data, that depends on the implementation."
Safely handling undefined values is important in optimistic concurrency control systems, which detect race conditions after the fact. For example, reading a shared variable protected by seqlock will produce an undefined value before determining that a race condition happened. It will then discard the undefined data and retry the operation.
The same is syntactically valid but has undefined behavior in C++, [8] however, where only the last-written member of a union is considered to have any value at all. For another example of type punning, see Stride of an array .
If the variable has a signed integer type, a program may make the assumption that a variable always contains a positive value. An integer overflow can cause the value to wrap and become negative, which violates the program's assumption and may lead to unexpected behavior (for example, 8-bit integer addition of 127 + 1 results in −128, a two's ...
However, any attempt to modify an object that is itself declared const by means of a const cast results in undefined behavior according to the ISO C++ Standard. In the example above, if ptr references a global, local, or member variable declared as const, or an object allocated on the heap via new int const, the code is only correct if ...