Some people--especially when those people are closest to the workings of the operational semantics--not being comfortable is a sign that it is in fact harder than it looks.
The problems with "freeze" are in the same vein as integer-to-pointer semantics: it's a change which turns out to have implications for things not closely related to the operation itself, giving it a spooky-action-at-a-distance effect that is hard to tame.
The deeper issue is that, while there is clearly a use for some sort of "garbage value" semantics in a high-level language (that supports things like uninitialized I/O buffers, excessive reads for vectorization, padding bytes within structures), it's not clear which of the subtly different variants of garbage value works the best for all of the use cases.
Some people--especially when those people are closest to the workings of the operational semantics--not being comfortable is a sign that it is in fact harder than it looks.
The problems with "freeze" are in the same vein as integer-to-pointer semantics: it's a change which turns out to have implications for things not closely related to the operation itself, giving it a spooky-action-at-a-distance effect that is hard to tame.
The deeper issue is that, while there is clearly a use for some sort of "garbage value" semantics in a high-level language (that supports things like uninitialized I/O buffers, excessive reads for vectorization, padding bytes within structures), it's not clear which of the subtly different variants of garbage value works the best for all of the use cases.