# Have Ruby warnings about uninitialized instance variables gotten more verbose in the past year?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/have-ruby-warnings-about-uninitialized-instance-variables-gotten-more-verbose-in-the-past-year/117550>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [October 17, 2007, 11:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/have-ruby-warnings-about-uninitialized-instance-variables-gotten-more-verbose-in-the-past-year/117550 "2007-10-17T23:50:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Bill\_McNeill](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/b5e925/32.png) [@Bill\_McNeill](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Bill_McNeill)\
**Post date:** [October 17, 2007, 11:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/have-ruby-warnings-about-uninitialized-instance-variables-gotten-more-verbose-in-the-past-year/117550/1 "2007-10-17T23:50:41Z")

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I just ran the unit tests on some code I haven’t touched since  
November 2006. The last time I checked, the unit tests ran without a  
hitch, but now I’m getting lots of “warning: instance variable … not  
initialized” warnings. The warning looks legit, but I’m confused  
because I don’t think I’ve changed anything on my end that would cause  
it to suddenly appear. Have Ruby versions released in the past year  
gotten more verbose about this warning?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bill\_McNeill](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/b5e925/32.png) [@Bill\_McNeill](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Bill_McNeill)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2007, 5:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/have-ruby-warnings-about-uninitialized-instance-variables-gotten-more-verbose-in-the-past-year/117550/2 "2007-10-18T05:09:12Z")

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On Oct 17, 2007, at 14:50 , Bill McNeill wrote:

> I just ran the unit tests on some code I haven’t touched since  
> November 2006. The last time I checked, the unit tests ran without a  
> hitch, but now I’m getting lots of “warning: instance variable … not  
> initialized” warnings. The warning looks legit, but I’m confused  
> because I don’t think I’ve changed anything on my end that would cause  
> it to suddenly appear. Have Ruby versions released in the past year  
> gotten more verbose about this warning?

No.

$ ruby168 -wve ‘p @foo’  
ruby 1.6.8 (2002-12-24) [powerpc-darwin8.2.0]  
-e:1: warning: instance variable @foo not initialized  
nil

Maybe you added “-w” ?