Question

I generally see examples of initialisation vs assignment like this:

int funct1(void)
{int a = 5; /*initialization*/
a = 6;}     /*assignment*/

Obviously something left as garbage or undefined somehow is uninitialized.

But could some one please define if initialization is reserved for definition statements and/or whether assignments can be called initialisation?

int funct2(void)
{int b;     
b = 5;}     /*assignment, initialization or both??*/

Is there much of a technical reason why we can’t say int b is initialised to garbage (from the compilers point of view)?

Also if possible could this be compared with initializing and assinging on non-primitive data types.

Answer 1

As far as the language standard is concerned, only statements of the form int a = 5; are initialisation. Everything of the form b = 5; is an assignment.

The same is true of non-primitive types.