[_delirium]

> if you have a computer scientist mindset...

Even things written by computer scientists sometimes follow the empty-is-zero model for convenience. awk's arrays behave very similarly to Excel's cell grid in this particular manner: they are conceptually of infinite size, and any element not yet set is implicitly 0. Hence you can calculate word-counts with something along the lines of count[$i]++ without first checking whether count[$i] exists; and you can also sum the counts of a predefined list of words, without throwing in if-count[$i]-is-defined checks.

[kazinator]

You can't accuse Alfred Aho (the 'A' in 'awk') of not being a computer scientist. Yet in awk, nonexistent varaibles serve as zero or empty strings, and strings that look like numbers can be used for arithmetic. This is a matter of pragmatism which depends on the goal of the tool and the target users.

No doubt, it poorly serves users who want to create huge, complicated spreadsheets, or large programs.

Spreadsheets could address the problem by having this as a cell property. Suppose you could highlight a rectangular region of the spreadsheet and mark the whole region as having "strict initialization": any cells in the region which are empty will trigger a diagnostic if they are accessed.