I know you must have been aching for the response to the quiz from three weeks ago. If you haven’t thought of your own answer yet, go back to the code and have another look. Try running it through a compiler with all the warnings turned on - it might tell you what the bug is (more or less), but probably not how to solve it. The Yard class does not have a constructor in the example, meaning its members, most notable have_fox_ are not initialized or (in the case of animals_) that they are default-constructed. You’ll have noted that have_fox_ and animals_ are treated differently. That’s because have_fox_ is an instance of a fundamental (a.k.a. primitive) type (bool, in this case) whereas animals_ is an instance of a class (a vector of pointers to Animals, in this case). When a class, like Yard, doesn’t have a default constructor, the compiler will generate one for you, which will call the default constructs of any members of your class. However, it won’t initialize anything to any “default” value - there is no such thing as a default value in C++.

If you are used to programming in Java or C#, this lack of automatic initialization of a variable in C++ may come as a surprise to you, so it may be useful to see what the Standard as to say about this:

3.1 Declarations and definitions [basic.def]

  1. A declaration (clause 7) introduces names into a translation unit or redeclares names introduced by previous declarations. A declaration specifies the interpretation and attributes of these names.

  2. A declaration is a definition unless it declares a function without specifying the function’s body (8.4), it contains the extern specifier (7.1.1) or a linkage-specification (7.5) and neither an initializer nor a function-body, it declares a static data member in a class declaration (9.4), it is a class name declaration (9.1), or it is a typedef declaration (7.1.3), a using-declaration (7.3.3), or a using-directive (7.3.4).

  3. (…)

  4. [Note: in some circumstances, C++ implementations implicitly define the default constructor (12.1), copy constructor (12.8), assignment operator (12.8), or destructor (12.4) member functions. [Example: given

 struct C {
 string s; // string is the standard library class (clause 21)
 };
 int main()
 {
 C a;
 C b = a;
 b = a;
 }

the implementation will implicitly define functions to make the definition of C equivalent to

 struct C {
 string s;
 C(): s() { }
 C(const C& x): s(x.s) { }
 C& operator=(const C& x) { s = x.s; return *this; }
 ˜C() { }
 };

—end example] —end note]

  1. [Note: a class name can also be implicitly declared by an elaborated-type-specifier (3.3.1). ]

  2. A program is ill-formed if the definition of any object gives the object an incomplete type (3.9).

Furthermore, section 8.5 of the standard ([dcl.init]) says “A declarator can specify an initial value for the identifier being declared” (emphasis mine). If that isn’t done and the type of a declared variable is a “plain-old-data” or POD type, the variable is left uninitialized (otherwise, it is default-initialized).

So, how does this result in a bug? An uninitialized variable has an unspecified value. The code in the example expects the value of have_fox_ to be false when the Yard is first constructed - but “unspecified” means there is nothing to guarantee that. That means that there’s a good chance that have_fox_ is not false (and therefore true) when the code is first called - which means the object thinks it always has at least one fox, even if there is none.

Note, though, that my habits have beaten me to it: the code actually checks whether animals_ is empty - which implies there are no foxes either - before checking whether have_fox_ is true, so the bug is really not there: it’s out-smarted by my coding habits. Though that makes the quiz a moot point, at least it gave me an opportunity to tell you all of the above!