[SM9]

Originally Posted by h3bus Is that because scripters can make mistakes with it? Or is there another reason, because this one isn't a good reason at all.

It can cause crashes if not used properly, I assume its safe to use if you know what you are doing, although I might be wrong.

[friagram]

There is nothing wrong using decl if it is done so properly. Most computer languages support this feature.

The problem is many people fail to initialize the data, usually because the return from the function they try to set it with fails and then does not set it, or they have some case in their code where it gets used without being set.

In most cases it does not take much time to just initialize the data, so it is decided by the am team to be better practice to always initialize the data.

A good example of using decl would be to make an array with 64 cells, and add player indecides to it, incrementing a counter each time. Data after the counter does not need to be initialized. Sorting and such benefits from this too. While it is small in speed since it just skips a few instructions, when doing often like in loops, it does make a difference.