Imported From: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-399?orig=1
Reporter: @michael-nischt
Attachments:

• Test.scala (created on Jan 22, 2008 8:12:03 AM UTC, 253 bytes)

@michael-nischt said:
Code Example

Geoffrey Alan Washburn (washburn) said:
This is the expected behavior. Use "lazy val" if would like to have your desired behavior.

@michael-nischt said:
Replying to [comment:1 washburn]:

This is the expected behavior. Use "lazy val" if would like to have your desired behavior.

Really, I mean this is a source of unnecessary bugs. Futhermore it breaks the contract of vals, because the value changes from the default to the assigned.

Actually, I would strongly recommend to make it result in a compile error 'undeclared', as it isn't a that time.

Geoffrey Alan Washburn (washburn) said:
Marking the use undeclared would not solve the problem, because you could still write the following and observe this

class Foo {
  println ( this.foo )
  val foo = 1
}

It is less than ideal, but we have discussed the problem, and I am told that attempts to fix this have been made in the past, and given the limitations of the JVM, they were all worse.

@odersky said:
Milestone 2.7.0 deleted

this is the oldest ticket on this, afaict.

there are many others, so anyone wanting to find all of the discussion on this over the years has some link-chasing to do, e.g. to #4152 and many other linked or transitively linked tickets, mailing list discussions, etc