No, it&#x27;s not. That deceives programmers into thinking &quot;oh, it&#x27;s just some random garbage&quot;, but it&#x27;s not. It&#x27;s not random, and it&#x27;s not merely &quot;garbage&quot;. It&#x27;s an incredible interplay between the exact allocation patterns of your program and user input, and results in that glossy word &quot;uninitialized&quot; including things like &quot;user passwords&quot;, &quot;private keys&quot;, &quot;shell code&quot; (that is, attacker-supplied arbitrary assembly code), and arbitrary other non-garbage information that you may not appreciate having at at this point in the program that is completely oblivious about what is in that &quot;uninitialized&quot;.<p>Uninitialized isn&#x27;t &quot;a mess that you really ought to clean up before using&quot;, it&#x27;s <i>radioactive waste</i>.<p>If you want to tell me that you really do think of &quot;uninitialized&quot; that way every time you use it, I have no grounds to disagree with you personally... but based on the code in the wild, it does not seem that most C programmers do have a correct understanding of the issue.<p>(People who develop the proper level of concern about handling radioactive waste tend to find ways to stop programming in languages that don&#x27;t default to handing back nuclear waste on every memory allocation. I suspect some form of evaporative cooling may be a problem here.)