> >as it's impossible to predict what kind of bugs we'll have here,
> >i don't think you can say the change will help or hurt.
> >  
> >
> Agreed, but I think if things were assigned to known values before 
> conditional expressions involving them it can avoid accidents.

it avoids accidents in some cases and causes accidents in other cases.
ie. nonsense, IMO.

btw, are you going to propagate this NULL initialization to all the tree?
or this one is special?

YAMAMOTO Takashi