From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2009-11-24T19:05:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Warning: instance variable @foo not initialized

On Tuesday 24 November 2009, Seebs wrote:
> |On 2009-11-24, Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@alice.it> wrote:
> |> To answer your question: the library should have set those variable to
> |> nil before using them, if it wanted to avoid the warning (not
> |> necessarily in initialize, just before the variables were used). Not
> |> doing so, however, is perfectly correct, if you don't mind seeing the
> |> warnings. Personally, I don't like them, so I always assign instance
> |> variables before using them.
> |
> |Thanks!
> |
> |> I hope this helps
> |
> |It does.  I guess I'm a bit confused, 'cuz on the one hand, Prawn looks
> |pretty nice, but on the other hand, getting thousands of lines of warnings
> |running a simple test program sorta worries me.
> |
> |-s
> |

As I said, there's nothing wrong with not initializing instance variables to 
nil: it's a matter of preferences. It seems Prawn's author doesn't like to 
initialize variables to nil (indeed, it looks a bit too C-like for ruby) and 
doesn't mind some warnings. 

If the warnings only annoy you, you should be able to disable them by not 
passing the -w option to ruby. If instead you're worried that they can mean 
there's something wrong, I think you don't need to. Most of the times, 
warnings issued by ruby are harmless.

Stefano