Is it bad practice to initialize a variable to a dummy value?

Question

This question is a result of the answers to this question that I just asked.

It was claimed that this code is "ugly" because it initializes a variable to a value that will never be read:

String tempName = null;
try{
    tempName = buildFileName();
}
catch(Exception e){
    ...
    System.exit(1);
}
FILE_NAME = tempName;

Is this indeed bad practice? Should one avoid initializing variables to dummy values that will never actually be used?

(EDIT - And what about initializing a String variable to "" before a loop that will concatenate values to the String...? Or is this in a separate category?

e.g.

String whatever = "";
for(String str : someCollection){
   whatever += str;
}

)

Answer 1

I think there's no point in initializing variables to values that won't be used unless required by the language.

For example, in C#, the default value for a declared string variable is null, so you're not even gaining anything by explicitly writing it out. It's mostly a style choice, but since strings are immutable, initializing it to something else would actually allocate an extra string in memory that you'd just throw away anyway. Other languages may impose other considerations.